Recent good news on confidence, spending, and wage growth is real, but it occurred to me looking at my recent posts that I’ve neglected something important: context. Let’s take a look at the bigger picture when it comes to wage growth.
May 25, 2016
Recent good news on confidence, spending, and wage growth is real, but it occurred to me looking at my recent posts that I’ve neglected something important: context. Let’s take a look at the bigger picture when it comes to wage growth.
May 24, 2016
Another Federal Reserve official, Philadelphia Fed president Patrick Harker, has weighed in on rates, projecting two to three hikes over the rest of 2016, including a June increase. Much of the commentary on his statement and those of other Fed members has focused on the potential effects on the stock market—specifically, the risk that higher rates may pull the market down.
May 23, 2016
Once again, last week’s news was mostly positive, with housing starts and sales beating expectations, industrial production and manufacturing up, and the Fed releasing a surprisingly upbeat set of minutes that painted the U.S. economy as well along the road to recovery.
Combined with the positive results from previous weeks, this good data continues to support a recovery in growth for the second quarter.
May 20, 2016
With Memorial Day quickly approaching, it’s about time to break out the boom box and cue up the songs of summer. As a 50-year-old economist, I’m not exactly on the cutting edge of pop culture, so I consulted my younger and (much) hipper friends and colleagues, along with several websites.
Surprisingly, some recent Top 40 hits have a lot to say (intentionally or not) about the economy and the stock market.
Recently, several people have asked me what investors should do in their portfolios to prepare for the presidential election. One went so far as to contemplate going to cash around August, just in case.
Yesterday, we talked about managing your biases. Today, let’s look at some research tools that can help you do just that.
May 17, 2016
Bias is a fact of life. Our view of the world is colored by preconceptions, limited or mistaken information, and recent experience. On top of that limited and distorted impression, we then have to deal with a number of well-known systemic flaws in how we think, as discussed in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I’ve been thinking a lot about biases recently, with an eye to how to mitigate their effects.
May 16, 2016
Last week’s data was surprisingly positive, with both retail sales and consumer confidence beating expectations substantially, accompanied by upward revisions to past months. As consumers account for about two-thirds of the U.S. economy, this is extremely positive news.
After yesterday’s discussion of wage growth, today’s data on consumer spending and confidence makes for a good follow-up.
May 12, 2016
This will be a short post, as I’m at the Commonwealth Leaders Conference in Hawaii this week. (Tough job, I know, but someone has to do it.)
