Weekly Commentary

    In today’s investment landscape, the specific focus on China has leapt to the top of the list.  The nonstop trade-war rhetoric between the United States and China is driving this focus. Those talks are ongoing but are expected to conclude before the end of March. In the meantime, China has been experiencing a significant […]

  Two weeks ago, equity markets were in free fall, with the S&P 500 index posting its worst December since the Great Depression in 1931.  [i]     Today, just two weeks into the new year, equity markets are on the rebound.  The S&P 500 has rallied 10.43 percent off the low, recovering 3.57 percent […]

  It’s time for the annual tradition by Wall Street firms to make their incredibly inaccurate forecasts for 2019.  Astonishingly, the average expected return for 2019 is over 20 percent. [i]     I’m not sure how they do this, or why they get away with such amazing inaccuracy, but they do.  Last year, the […]

  After another wild week on Wall Street, you might expect consumers’ nerves to be frayed.  [i]     On the contrary, consumers did nothing but shop.  According to Mastercard, this holiday season represented the strongest growth in consumer spending in the last six years, not to mention that online sales grew 19.1 percent from […]

Last week’s interest rate announcement should have been a clear and decisive save by the Fed.  As expected, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) raised their benchmark interest rate ¼ point to 2.5 percent, but of more significance, they signaled a much more dovish tone for 2019. [i] According to Chairman Powell, they now only […]

  At the recent 2018 G20 Buenos Aires summit, where the leaders of the largest economies in the world gathered at the beginning of the month, there was a moment that was misunderstood. The “high five” between Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin of Russia was interpreted as a slap […]

  If the market playbook had followed its recent script, we should have had an extremely positive week last week.  Over the past several months, heated China trade-war rhetoric and hawkish Federal Reserve interest-rate remarks have taken center stage, and markets have responded accordingly with increased volatility. [i]     Last week, those two catalysts […]

    Many of you woke up this morning to news headlines on trade and a roaring stock market after this weekend’s G-20 conference concluded.  [i].  News feeds were littered with headlines surrounding a trade war truce between the U.S. and China, which followed the highly anticipated meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi […]

  Following last week’s Thanksgiving Day festivities was the annual shopping extravaganza known as Black Friday, which kicked off the holiday shopping season.  But if you didn’t get a chance to get any of your shopping done last Friday, don’t worry.  Many of the deals extended into other retail manufactured holidays such as “Small Business […]

  President Harry Truman grew so frustrated with his stable of economists always giving him contradictory answers that he quipped, “Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say ‘on hand…’, then ‘but on the other…” [i] If only Truman was here today.  He would have loved the recent flip-flopping from Jerome Powell, the powerful […]