October 11, 2023 | Daily JAM, Dividend Income, Long Term, Morning Briefing, Volatility |
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Monty Python observed back in 1970 before attempting to torture a coal-miner’s wife with a dish rack. There’s an important investing version of this core truth: The financial market usually worries about the wrong problem. So that when the “Spanish Inquisition” (in financial terms) finally arrives, everybody is surprised. Well, we investors and traders have done it to ourselves again. We’ve spent much of 2022 and a good part of 2023 worrying about whether Federal Reserve interest rate increases would send the economy into a recession. There are still a few recession die hards worrying about that possibility, but by and large the worry has shifted to whether or not the Fed will delay its rate cuts in 2024–and thus delay the arrival of the “rate-cut-bounce.” While MANY–but certainly not all–investors, traders, and market analysts have been looking OVER THERE, however, the credit markets have built up a huge debt overhead and the global debt bomb looks ever closer to exploding. A crisis with the dire effects of the Global Financial Crisis of mid-2007 to 2009 is a possibility. I’d “guess” that most portfolios aren’t ready. The time to get ready is now. This increasingly looks like a debt market crisis of the type known as a Minsky Moment. To get ready first understand the source of the problem. I’m putting together a new Special Report for next week on what to do to get ready. Today’s post is a kind of set up, a get ready for the post on getting ready, if you will.
September 21, 2020 | Daily JAM, Mid Term, You Might Have Missed |
The U.S. government’s debt will be almost twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2050, according to new projections from the Congressional Budget Office. That would be up from 98% this year and 79% in 2019. (The prior, pre-coronavirus forecast for 2050 debt in January...
July 31, 2019 | Daily JAM |
Can you connect the dots? No one in Washington seems to be willing to make the effort. On a day when the Federal Reserve said it would cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points and end its efforts to sell some of the bonds in its own portfolio two months...
July 15, 2019 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Okay, we all know that the current rally that has pushed U.S. equities to one record after another is built on cheap money. That is on a Federal Reserve that has promised to cut interest rates one, two, or maybe even three times in 2019. And on a hope on Wall Street...
July 11, 2019 | Daily JAM |
The U.S. budget deficit widened by 23% to $747.1 billion in the first nine months of the fiscal 2019 that started in October 2018 from the same nine-month period in fiscal 2018 period. The budget deficit will exceed 4% of GDP this fiscal year and stay above that level...
March 19, 2019 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
It's an extraordinary report--even if it's not clear what the Trump administration intends to do with it or about it In a report released today, March 19, President Trump's Council of Economic Advisers said that the U.S. economy would be unlikely to reach the 3%...
February 26, 2019 | Daily JAM |
The legislation that suspended the debt ceiling limit on borrowing  by the federal government expires on March 2. The likelihood that Congress will put aside its other conflicts and extend that suspension or pass a clean increase in the debt ceiling is just about nil....
January 20, 2019 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Our regular (or occasional or perhaps occasionally regular) Friday series (actually running on Sunday this week) Trick or Trend looks at what might (or might not) be emerging investible trends. Exclusively on JAM. This post won't run anywhere else. Ever. The character...
September 18, 2018 | Daily JAM, Mid Term |
Talk about frustratingly lagging data. China’s holdings of U.S. Treasuries fell to a six-month low in July, according to the latest data from the Treasury Department released today. The first found of U.S. tariffs went into effect on July 6. China’s ownership of U.S....
September 23, 2017 | Uncategorized |
The big event this week, as far as financial markets are concerned, will be the Wednesday announcement by the “Big Six” Republican working group of a framework for the long anticipated Republican plan to cut taxes.
July 21, 2011 | Daily JAM |
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