7 Dec 2015

Stocks Pop on Unemployment Data

Confirm payrolls for November rose 211,000, above the consensus estimate of 200,000, which follows the strong and upwardly revised October reading of 298,000 new jobs.  The unemployment rate held at five percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly to 62.5 percent from 62.4 percent. After the terrible showing on Thursday, ‘Super Mario’ Draghi flew to New York and spoke at an Economic Club event.  Knowing that his communications the day before had… Read More

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4 Dec 2015

Mario Draghi Taketh Away

Back in 2012, Draghi famously said that the ECB was ready to do ‘whatever it takes’ to preserve the euro. Although he was talking about keeping peripheral countries within the euro during their sovereign debt crisis, the ECB has developed a reputation over the past few years for exceeding investor expectations with their economic stimulus programs. That ended yesterday when the ECB failed to deliver the stimulus that markets were… Read More

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28 Sep 2015

The Possible Impact of a Housing Slowdown in China

Vanguard put out an interesting research piece on Friday, which you can read in full here, arguing that the bursting stock market bubble in China isn’t as big of a risk as a potential fall in their housing market. According to their research, housing is a much larger portion of total household wealth than stock ownership, which is the opposite of the US.  In China, housing makes up 43 percent… Read More

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23 Sep 2015

What Investors are Anxious About

Although there was no specific catalyst for yesterday’s trading action, investors are clearly worried about global growth.  The chart below shows the most recent Forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that were produced in July. While the global growth picture is flat and advanced economies are growing, according to their projections, emerging markets and China are slowing down.  This isn’t news: the market volatility that we’ve been dealing with… Read More

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11 Sep 2015

Debt Ceiling, Here We Come (Again)

Earlier this week, Ryan Craft and I went to Washington DC for a full day of presentations put on by Macroeconomic Advisors. We heard from some of the country’s top economists, including the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors (who also happened to be Hollywood superstar Matt Damon’s freshman roommate at Harvard). While I plan to share some… Read More

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31 Aug 2015

Stocks and the Real Economy

One of the interesting comments that I read in the early part of last week when markets were falling was that financial markets were doing poorly while the real economy was doing reasonably well. Over the last five years, I’ve heard people say countless times that we’ve had a nice recovery in financial assets while the real economy has sputtered along at growth rates well below our historical long-term trend… Read More

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26 Jun 2015

The State of Housing in Three Charts

I was reading in the Wall Street Journal that homes with 15 or more bedrooms were becoming very fashionable and, in a different article, master suites are now so large that they feature media rooms, offices, gyms, kitchenettes and laundry rooms. In other words, housing is back! Okay, maybe those things and the race to build a $100 million spec home (yet another article) signal that the rich are doing… Read More

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23 Jun 2015

Save Alexander Hamilton

My favorite television show of all time was The Wire, a gritty HBO series about the hard life of the people and institutions in Baltimore, from cops and drug dealers to longshoremen, politicians, lawyers and middle school kids. When the US Treasury announced last week that they intend to replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill in 2020 with an important woman in American History, my first thought was about… Read More

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15 Jun 2015

The IMF in the Spotlight

The ongoing debt crisis in Greece has put the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the spotlight.  For a lot of people, the question is, what is the IMF? I struggle with the answer as well.  My neighbor across the street worked for either the IMF or the World Bank, but I always get mixed up because all of these supranational organizations sound the same to me. As a Columbian national,… Read More

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12 Jun 2015

What Drives Long Run Economic Growth?

It’s Friday in the summertime, so I thought I would do something a little light and easy today. I was reading an article by a St. Louis Federal Reserve economist titled ‘What Drives Long-Run Economic Growth?‘ I’ve been writing about short-term economic issues like the impact of the cold weather on the first quarter and when the Fed might raise interest rates (June, September or January?), so the long-run idea was appealing. The author,… Read More

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