Covid and Gridlock The stock market has had to digest multiple significant news events recently. The Covid virus has made a dramatic resurgence in Europe and the United States and added incremental risk to the pace of the continuing global economic rebound. A new administration with a very different agenda appears to have been elected to the White House. Additionally, [...]
Forward Momentum Continues Global economic growth has moderated from its blistering mid-year pace, with a full recovery from the pandemic-induced lockdown recession not likely until well into next year. Failure to contain the virus has caused a slowing, but not stalling, of the expansion. Despite the more modest recent growth, the International Monetary Fund now predicts that the global economic [...]
The Bumpy Road to Recovery Earlier this year, global economies suffered rapid and intensive damage resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. The shelter-in-place lockdowns needed to limit the extent of the virus outbreak caused significant collateral damage to the overall economy. Generous government support for the unemployed, in addition to massive capital outlays for businesses and credit markets, kept the economic [...]
Slowly Emerging from the Storm As businesses gradually begin to reopen, the upturn in the global economy has commenced. Trillions of dollars in federal spending and aggressive monetary easing provided the support mechanism needed to move us past the darkest hours of the Covid-induced economic decline. Meanwhile, scientific progress on vaccines is also rapidly progressing. The net result of these [...]
Uncharted Waters In the United States and around the world, Covid-19 has threatened the health of people and economies. Medical facilities have been overrun by sudden waves of patients, deaths have occurred in large numbers, entire populations have been under stay-at-home orders, economies have ground to a halt and stock market volatility has risen to extreme levels. Peoples' lives and [...]
Marching Onward and Upward In 2019, the stock market performed well beyond what most investors would have reasonably anticipated. Powered by a domestic economy that refused to fall into recession and supported by the easing of interest rates and some progress on the trade front, the S&P 500 rose 29% for the year. With those stellar returns now behind us, [...]
"Whenever You Find Yourself on the Side of the Majority, it is Time to Pause and Reflect." In our last letter we noted that the length of our current economic expansion had moved into record territory, and it continues. However, now that we are 125 months into the longest expansion going back to 1854, investors are working hard to convince [...]
“It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again” That famous quote attributed to baseball legend Yogi Berra could just as easily apply to the stock market today. In fact, it strikes us that many of Mr. Berra's "Yogi-isms" apply to today's stock market, but we digress... Fear of a recession at the end of 2018 caused the Federal Reserve to announce early [...]
Economic Strength with a Dose of Uncertainty During the first four months of 2019, the S&P 500 advanced almost 18% as stocks quickly snapped back from the dive they took in the final quarter of last year. A shift in policy by the Federal Reserve, in which they no longer anticipate additional interest rate increases this year, ignited the V-shaped [...]
Fear Recedes as Quickly as it Arrived During the first quarter of 2019, the S&P 500 advanced 13% as stocks quickly snapped back from the dive they took in the final quarter of last year. A shift in policy by the Federal Reserve, in which they no longer anticipate additional interest rate increases this year, ignited the V-shaped recovery for [...]
