Yet Again Different Outcomes for Investors, Workers

June 1, 2020 Thanks to COVID-19, there is a huge disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street…again. Despite what’s happening all over the country in terms of unemployment and a general lull in economic activity, the S&P 500 isn’t far off from its all-time high....

The Long Pain of Policy Mishaps and Free Spending

May 25, 2020 I know we’re in a pandemic, but the Federal Reserve’s recent agenda is rather incredible. The Federal Funds Rate is basically 0 percent. On top of that, COVID-19 fiscal stimulus will push our 2020 deficit to near $4 trillion. The central bank is...

Rent Payments, Stock Buys Drying Up

May 18, 2020 Two observations struck me lately that I think could foretell our days ahead. First off, tens of billions of dollars in rent went unpaid last month. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants had not paid their rent, up from 18...

The Models No Longer Apply

May 11, 2020 I want to piggyback off last week’s post about our economic return to normalcy and present more evidence for a longer-than-anyone-wants recovery. How can we know what the recovery will be like with so many unknowns and no real idea of where the...

Economic Recoveries are Like Alphabet Soup

May 4, 2020 Economic recoveries often tend to take letter shapes on a graph. A V-shaped recovery is the best-case scenario. When that happens, recovery is as fast as the decline – hit the bottom and quickly back to business. U-shaped recoveries are middle of the road....

COVID-19 Infecting Economic Supply and Demand

April 27, 2020 There’s an obvious, yet profound, concept that explains why the economy is in danger. It is this – one person’s spending is another person’s income. This relationship is the essence of the $87 trillion global economy. The interplay between spending,...