The Fed’s money creation since 2020 caused a massive supply/demand imbalance, pushing annual CPI inflation from 2.3% as of December 2019 to 8.5% in March 2022. The Fed prioritized restoring employment for too long before turning its attention to inflation. With wages not rising enough to offset inflation, lost income by workers more than offsets […]
There is a lot of media discussion about inflation and how the current Administration is or is not handling things. One critical element that is not disputable is a pandemic induced shutdown is not a normal thing. Neither was a new worlds record for cash in the bank. The cash drove demand for goods and […]
I attended a symposium on Family Office investing this past week. A couple of folks from the Fidelity Digital Assets unit shared many interesting and what I found to be valuable thoughts, and here are a few… Crypto volatility vs. Netflix? Are they really different? Yes, three years ago Bitcoin was around 5000 and now […]
Inflation is a political lightning rod. As a result, there is a good deal of misconception around it. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is up 7.9% from a year ago and will likely peak in the 8.5 – 9.0% range sometime in the next couple of months, and will be the highest since 1981. Personal […]
Raising children and grandchildren is challenging in the best of circumstances. But when a child has special needs or a disability, the hurdles can look more like mountains and the potholes can feel more like bottomless pits. That’s especially true when it comes to paying for the many expenses that can accompany raising a special […]
Passing on financial values to heirs can be just as important as transferring assets to them.
When I suggested they went boom…prices for intermediate processed goods are up 24.1% versus a year ago while unprocessed goods are up 29.7% versus a year ago.
*The distributed ledger technology of blockchain is most commonly associated with bitcoin and other “cryptos,” but the use of such tech reaches much wider. An example is non-fungible tokens, which are non-interchangeable units of data stored on a blockchain that can be sold and traded. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are identical units that can be exchanged […]
Late last year we shared our stock market forecast for 2022 (thanks again Brian Wesbury), projecting the S&P 500 would rise to 5,250. Since then, however, equities have dropped, with (now realized) fears about Russia invading Ukraine and the recognition that inflation is a more persistent problem than the Federal Reserve had previously let on, […]
Heads up if your thinking Real Estate. Home sales declined 4.6% in December at a lower than expected rate and December sales are down 7.1% versus a year ago and fell in all major regions. The decline was in both single-family homes and condos/co-ops. The other side of that coin is that the median price of […]