It is hard to think of two companies that are more different than General Motors and Twitter. One deals in heavy metal, is both an American industrial titan and an icon of business history, is a recovering bankrupt, and is everything to do with manufacturing real assets that last a long time. The other is a new company that deals in the deliberately short and ephemeral, employs relatively few—especially when compared with GM—and is a titan of the new social media era. The fact that both are actually successful American businesses gives a look at the scope of what our economy actually covers.

And, yet, even given their diversity and scope, these companies do have something in common—both have seen their growth prospects come into question, as previous assumptions of strength are proving false.

Recently, the weather has been blamed for poor employment figures, poor car sales, and pretty much every other lackluster economic result. Is this a legitimate explanation or just an excuse?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oowl5eq-NLM 

I had a good talk yesterday with two journalists whom I respect quite a bit, Pimm Fox and Carol Massar of Bloomberg Radio’s Taking Stock. We started off discussing the markets, why things were down, and what might happen, and then they asked an excellent question: what should an investor do, and why?

It was so good a question, in fact, that I didn’t have a good, short answer. So much depends on the investor’s plan, his or her time frame, risk tolerance, and so on and so forth that it’s almost impossible to come up with a succinct response.

With the market’s recent declines, it’s not surprising that the doomsayers are showing up again. In the past couple of days, I’ve heard from several advisors whose clients have received e-mails or read articles that highlight all of the things going wrong, forecasting the imminent collapse of, well, just about everything. Perhaps you’ve received or seen one of these publications yourself.

Let’s start with the real risks. Stock markets worldwide seem to be in the midst of a correction. Here in the U.S., we appear to face the risk of further declines. This has been reinforced by recent economic news that was somewhat less positive than expected. We could be seeing a stock market correction and a slowdown in the recovery. These are real risks, and they shouldn’t be ignored or minimized. They are, however, normal risks, signifying that the economy has recovered to a more normal place. They are not catastrophic risks.

I gave a talk here at Commonwealth yesterday, updating our staff about the economy and the markets. One point kept coming up over and over—that we’re now at or close to normal levels of growth, as of the mid-2000s, which was a pretty good time. In some areas, such as employment, we still haven’t returned to normal levels in total, but getting normal growth is the first step.

(As an aside, this type of internal training and education is part of what makes Commonwealth exceptional. Everyone is welcome, and these talks happen all the time on many different subjects.)

A couple of bad days recently have rattled many investors. After the strong run-up in the stock market to the end of last year and the continued strong economic reports, many expected the market would continue to perform strongly. Instead, we have had stability for most of the month, with small declines followed by recoveries—until the past week, when we’ve seen one of the worst sell-offs in the past couple of years. What gives?

The key phrase there is “the past couple of years.” So far, we have seen, at worst, about a 4-percent decline, and as of this morning, the market has ticked back up. Is this something we should be worried about?

In the past couple of weeks, there have been several indications of a slowdown in the U.S. recovery, and international markets have shown weakness. Over the past week, we’ve seen that translate to drops in U.S. interest rates and declines in the stock market. Since we ended last year, thinking there was nothing but blue skies ahead, clouds have rolled in. Should we be worried? And if so, about what?

Let’s start by looking at the U.S. economy. The first cloud was the shockingly weak jobs number three weeks ago: only 74,000 jobs were reported as created, against an expectation of around 200,000. I analyzed that figure and concluded, based on other data, that it was a false signal, due primarily to severe weather. Nonetheless, I saw it as something that should signal caution.

— Guest post from Peter Essele, senior investment research analyst

There’s been quite a bit of speculation lately regarding the long-term direction of interest rates, particularly around movements on the short end. We’ve heard numerous specialists’ thoughts on the subject, and most believe the Fed won’t hike rates on the short end until late 2015, at the earliest. Although they make for good sound bites on CNBC, there really doesn’t seem to be much basis for many of these prognostications, so we decided to put pen to paper to assess the direction of rates.

Today, I want to tie together my posts over the past week. If you remember, we talked about the mismatch between current return expectations and what history suggests as likely, and what investors could do about it. I talked about truly diversified asset allocation and regular rebalancing as a required base strategy, along with possibly using some other risk-reduction technique, like market timing, to guard against large drawdowns. This discussion was interrupted, in a very timely way, by a response to turbulence in emerging markets and a relatively large (in recent terms) market decline in the U.S. on Friday.