Let’s talk about the week that was, as the S&P 500 fell -7.03 percent, on top of the losses of 5.71 percent over the previous two weeks. All told, the loss for the S&P 500 is now -17.54 percent from the all-time high set on September 20th. Although I don’t follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closely, I know that many of you do, in part because that’s what’s… Read More
Stocks are suffering for two basic reasons: slowing global growth and tightening central bank policy. While both of these rationales are true, they’re also very generic. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to look at the big sectors driving the market performance and try to describe what’s happening in each one for a little more granularity. There are 11 sectors, and I won’t be discussing all of them, because… Read More
Last week, the phrase ‘inverted yield curve’ exploded from the confines of a trading room to the everyday world. It hit me when I went to a holiday cocktail party after work one night and someone said, ‘oh, I heard that the stock market is down because something else is upside down. I guess the whole world is upside down!’ Before we get into what happened last week, let’s take… Read More
Last week, I said that the stock market had three big questions for the Federal Reserve and its chair Jay Powell. You can read the full article here, but the questions were as follows: What is the course of interest rates? What will happen with the Fed’s balance sheet? Will the Fed support the stock market, as it has in the recent past? This past week saw a major market… Read More
