As a forecasting rule of thumb, the yield curve has been pretty good — but it may not be a good rule of thumb today.
We were prepared for a more difficult ride than we wound up with. An S&P 500 of 3 percent is not terrific, but it's not a bad year.
Ever since the train bombing in Spain [on March 11], there's been an expectation built into the market that there's a pretty good chance that something like that will happen here before our election.
Right now bonds are reacting, and perhaps overreacting, to employment and CPI. What we will probably see in the next couple of months is that we aren't as close to an interest-rate hike as those two reports might suggest.
My expectation is the general trend of the next few quarters is for profit growth rates to come down, and it will start by having companies send out that message.
One popular explanation is that there is a glut of capital in the world in search of a home, and a lot of it finds its way into relatively risk-free assets, such as Treasury bonds.
If the targets continue to be specific industries such as financial firms and airlines, it's not clear that another terror attack will have strong ripple effects through the rest of the economy.
We got off to such a raging start this year, it was hard to believe it was sustainable. There was very little that warranted the huge run-up in prices coming out of the gate.
That's not what we expected to see in a year when earnings growth would slow slightly, and we were seeing some of that slowing already.
Copyright © 2024 Electric Goat Media. All Rights Reserved.