I spent last week down in the Florida Keys on vacation with my family. It was great. The weather was terrific, we went snorkeling and kayaking, and the place we stayed was very nice. Truly relaxing.

The 10-year Treasury yield has been climbing steadily since hitting a low of 0.5 percent in August 2020. This week, as of April 20, it was close to 1.56 percent. But the rise in rates hasn’t been equal across the broad spectrum of fixed income instruments. If you’re an investor who hasn’t made any changes to your fixed income portfolio since last August, it’s likely your exposures have changed. As a result, your investments may not be delivering the benefits you’re looking for. To assess the situation, take a look under the hood at your fixed income portfolio. But first you need to understand what current interest rates are telling us—and how inflation is involved.

Infrastructure is the backbone of any healthy economy, and America’s is in desperate need of refurbishment and investment. Indeed, President Biden campaigned on a promise to revitalize our aging infrastructure and to invest heavily in clean energy. Biden recently took the first step in that direction by introducing the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan. Let’s talk about this plan’s winners and losers, as well as what it could mean for your investment portfolio.

Today's post is from Michael Geraci, supervisor, retirement consulting investment services.

Last year was a challenging one for the financial markets, resulting in volatility for most investment products. In fact, the coronavirus pandemic presented the biggest test for most asset allocation products since the 2008 financial crisis. 401(k) investments were no exception, specifically target-date funds.

Today's post is from Jim McAllister, director, equity research.

Two weeks ago, after several weeks of significant improvement, the medical news started to worsen as case growth and positive test rates ticked back up. Whether this situation might signal the start of another wave of infection growth was an open question. The good news is that the answer looks to be no. Case growth, while slightly above recent lows, has stayed steady despite the continued reopening of the economy and the increasing spread of more contagious variants of COVID-19. While the battle against the pandemic continues, vaccinations are also continuing. They should end up choking the virus off before it gets to a significant fourth wave. The medical risks are still real, but they are lower than they were two weeks ago, and they’re dropping every week.

“The number one problem in today’s generation and economy is the lack of financial literacy.” —Alan Greenspan

The first quarter looks to be the turning point, both for the pandemic here in the U.S. and for the economic damage it has caused. While risks still remain, especially in the short term, the significant progress we made in the first two months of the year started coming to fruition in March, signaling that we are through the worst of it.

We have had a lot of good economic news recently, including the significant bounce in consumer confidence reported by the Conference Board. Consumer confidence rose by more than 20 percent last month, to the highest level since September, before the third wave. According to that increase, people are feeling much better about the economy and their place in it.

I wanted to use the title “Leverage, Margin Calls, and Stock Prices, Oh My” here. But I decided to go with the more specific title so readers would actually know what I was taking about. Those are the real themes, though, as the hedge fund/private family office Archegos is simply the latest iteration of an old and sad story.