Banks fail. No matter what guardrails we put in place, how many regulators are supposed to be overseeing them, or how sterling the top executives’ reputations, banks fail. Rarely do they all collapse at once, fortunately, and there aren’t always major reverberations throughout the economy, but bank implosions have happened before, and they’ll happen again. […]
Manufacturers’ warehouses were bursting with unsold inventory. Industrial production started shutting down. Yet labor was somehow in short supply and workers were demanding higher wages. This was the scene as recession took hold of the American economy in late 1960, while the nation – and probably a few corpses in Chicago – decided whether John […]
Commercial real estate recovers from long Covid Residential real estate prices are dropping in response to higher mortgage rates, even as unit sales are increasing. While homes generally appreciate in value over the long haul, it’s a dicey proposition from an investing perspective. It’s great to know that your personal domain will be worth more […]
This year, the federal government expects to take in about $4.9 trillion in fiscal year 2023, compared with last year’s $4.8 trillion. You could make the case that, allowing for inflation, government revenues are actually going down, but be careful who you try to make that case to. If it’s to the American taxpayer who’s […]
Last month, the human population of the Earth surpassed 8 billion. These people all need food, shelter, clothing and – no joke – cell phones. More than 9 out of 10 people worldwide have these devices. Can the Earth’s bounty sustain such a census? Can demand keep up with supply? Yes, probably, but it’s going […]
How in the world did we manage positive GDP Growth for Q3? Aren’t we supposed to be moving closer and closer to a recession—if not in one already? And if the first two quarters were negative but Q3 is now positive, does that mean we are out of the woods? These are frequent questions I […]
It has happened before. In fact, it’s happened more than once. Wars that start in Ukraine have a way of not ending there. History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. The first stanza of “Let’s Conquer Ukraine Then Go on To Wreak Havoc on a Continental Scale” dates back to the year […]
Mortgage rates are spiking, so people are putting off buying a house. Those who already own their four walls are staying put because they know they’ll never get better loan terms than they have right now. In the meantime, household formations are exceeding housing starts by about 2,000 units every 12 months. That’s actually nothing […]
Type “definition of” into your Google search field and see what autocomplete prompts you get. Your algorithm may vary, but when we did it just now, “narcissist” was high on the list and “insanity” was even higher. But the top prompt was “recession”. Yet so many of us throw around this term without knowing what […]
Inflation arises from an environment where the number of dollars and credit outpace the goods and services available. In its simplest form, there are two ways to combat inflation, curb spending or expand supply. The Fed utilizes monetary tools in an attempt to increase or lower demand to balance the disparity between Supply/Demand. The biggest […]
