The Economy & Investing
86 articles filed under The Economy & Investing.
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The Economy & Investing
David Stockman to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
David Stockman to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Advice on the Nearly Impossible Job of Cutting $2 Trillion from the Federal Budget When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s…
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The Economy & Investing
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Are Recalibrating the Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio… Shouldn’t We Be Paying Attention?
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Are Recalibrating the Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio… Shouldn’t We Be Paying Attention? For several years, Warren Buffett has been warning investors that there are fundamental…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Inflation Cools Again – What’s Next?
Chart of the Week: Inflation Cools Again – What’s Next? I’m halfway through writing an essay about the state of the US economy as I see it, including my analysis of US inflation. Reading Sean’s piece on…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: More Pain Inbound?
Chart of the Week: More Pain Inbound? As Sean mentions this week, I’d been concerned that the stock market was cruising for a bruising for some time now. Between our government’s $34 trillion debt problem, the…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: US Debt Reaches $35 Trillion
Chart of the Week: US Debt Reaches $35 Trillion Today, Sean provides visuals to illustrate the greatest threat (next to a nuclear war, which is also looming) to the world’s economy right now: US debt. This is…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Presidential Elections and the Stock Market
Chart of the Week: Presidential Elections and the Stock Market How will the election affect the stock market? As Sean points out, there is no reliable correlation, from any number of perspectives, between…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Small Caps Rebound?
Chart of the Week: Small Caps Rebound? I’m halfway through a piece I’m writing on what I’m calling “the state of the US economy.” I’m looking at it from the perspective of what I see happening among my friends…
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The Economy & Investing
American Workers Have Quit Quitting, for Now
American Workers Have Quit Quitting, for Now The job-hopping frenzy of the pandemic years has given way to what some economists are calling the “big stay.” Click here. Home Insurance Keeps Surging Home…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Retail Declines Again
Chart of the Week: Retail Declines Again Before I read Sean’s piece for this week’s issue, I was looking at retail numbers myself. I was wondering why the data was still largely positive when so many of my…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: It’s Up! It’s Down! What’s Going on with Nvidia?
Chart of the Week: It’s Up! It’s Down! What’s Going on with Nvidia? Thanks to my broker Dominick’s recommendation, I was an early investor in Nvidia, and profited very handsomely from it. From the start, there…
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The Economy & Investing
Americans Are Still Losing Money on Their Money
Americans Are Still Losing Money on Their Money As the Fed raised interest rates over the past two years, the returns on bonds and other debt instruments have increased substantially. While I’ve seen so many…
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The Economy & Investing
A Good Time to Live in the South!
A Good Time to Live in the South! America's real GDP grew by 2.5 percent in 2023. That was a country-wide average. But, as you can see from this map, some areas of the country did considerably better than…
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The Economy & Investing
Why Is the Market Going Up?
Why Is the Market Going Up? This week, for a change, I am not commenting on a chart that Sean sent us to illustrate some points about the stock market and investing. Instead, I’ve asked him to explain why…
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The Economy & Investing
Once Again, the Idea of a Wealth Tax Surfaces
Once Again, the Idea of a Wealth Tax Surfaces In the new global/socialist age, the desire to tax and redistribute income and wealth is greater than ever. And the good people of the UN and G-20 are doing…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: When to Buy Stocks
Chart of the Week: When to Buy Stocks One thing any experienced salesperson knows is that, despite what we like to think, people make the decision to buy things based on their emotions rather than their reason…
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The Economy & Investing
The Supply Crunch in Luxury Homes
The Supply Crunch in Luxury Homes The difference between a mortgage rate of 3%, where rates were four years ago, and 5.5%, where they are today, can make a significant difference in the monthly mortgage…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Interest Payments Explode
Chart of the Week: Interest Payments Explode This week’s chart is an appropriate follow-up to Sean’s April 22 column and my April 24 post on inflation. As you can see from the chart, the cost of servicing our…
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The Economy & Investing
The Jamaica Exception
The Jamaica Exception “The main two things that bring down a great nation are war and debt,” says Bill Bonner in the April 17 issue of Bonner Private Research, “and the US is not backing away from either of…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: A Troubling Trend
Chart of the Week: A Troubling Trend M2 – otherwise known as “money supply” – is the term economists use to represent the amount of cash that is moving around in an economy at any particular time. It includes…
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The Economy & Investing
New York City: Time to Sell?
New York City: Time to Sell? There is reason to believe that the current burden of the migrants taking advantage of New York City’s sanctuary city status may bankrupt it in the next 12 to 24 months. The city’s…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: The Effect of Interest Rate Changes
Chart of the Week: The Effect of Interest Rate Changes Most Americans, including college-educated Americans, know little about economics and next to nothing about how the decisions made by the US Treasury and…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: The Effect of Money Supply on Inflation
Chart of the Week: The Effect of Money Supply on Inflation I’m not a stock market analyst. I’m not even interested in stocks. But I have a sizable percentage of my wealth (about 20% to 25%) in stocks because…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Is the Market Overbought?
Chart of the Week: Is the Market Overbought? This week, Sean asks a question that many stock investors and most stock traders have been worried about recently: For nearly 90 days, the market has been outpacing…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: From Your First $100,000 to $1 Million
Chart of the Week: From Your First $100,000 to $1 Million Einstein once called compound interest the Eighth Wonder of the World. And when it comes to wealth building, it deserves that title, because its…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: The Cluster of Woe
Chart of the Week: The Cluster of Woe I’ve been in the economic and investment prediction business for more than 40 years, and many of my favorite colleagues have been occasional or perma-bears. I was once…
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The Economy & Investing
Government Unemployment Numbers Hide Economic Reality
Last week, Sean demonstrated something that everyone that wants to understand the true state of our economy needs to understand: Many of the numbers we get from government agencies, numbers that are repeated…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week: Misleading Job Growth Numbers
Chart of the Week: Misleading Job Growth Numbers This week, Sean investigates reports of US job growth in recent months – reports that the Biden administration is touting as evidence of the success of…
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The Economy & Investing
Yes, Restaurant Prices Are Higher – Considerably Higher!
Yes, Restaurant Prices Are Higher – Considerably Higher! K and I spent a long weekend in LA at the end of last month visiting Numbers One and Two Sons and their families. Dado (yours truly) was happy to grab…
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The Economy & Investing
Newsom’s Magnificently Stupid Plan to Fill His State’s $68 Billion Budget Hole
Newsom’s Magnificently Stupid Plan to Fill His State’s $68 Billion Budget Hole Governor Newsom and California Democrats are once again “pioneering” an economic idea that is bound to fail. I don’t know what…
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The Economy & Investing
2023 Was a Pretty Good Year for the Global Economy, but…
2023 Was a Pretty Good Year for the Global Economy, but… Despite widespread global inflation, geopolitical problems, and the economic after-effects of COVID and the lockdowns, the global economy in 2023 did a…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week — January 8, 2024
Chart of the Week One of the numbskull ideas that have always been part of political discussions is that the ups and downs of the economy and/or the financial markets are responses to the legislative or…
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The Economy & Investing
Chart of the Week
Chart of the Week This week, Sean provides a chart on US household spending that shows an uptrend in investment in stocks. The WSJ says it’s because it’s easier than ever to buy stocks. But Sean has a…
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The Economy & Investing
What Is the Future for Stocks Over the Next Five Years?
What Is the Future for Stocks Over the Next Five Years? Just before publication, I asked Sean MacIntyre, who, along with my broker Dominick, has been managing the stock portfolio I set up ten years ago, if he…
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The Economy & Investing
Clip of the Week: Not a Great Time to Buy a New Home
Home sales fell to a 13-year low in October – presumably because interest rates are still pretty high and home prices haven’t come down hard enough to meet demand. According to the National Association of…
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The Economy & Investing
Clip of the Week: Loans from Uncle Warren
From Garrett Baldwin, writing in Postcards from the Florida Republic: “Let’s talk about the Warren Buffett Closed-End Fund. A lot of people avoid closed-end funds because of their misunderstanding of risk. But…
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The Economy & Investing
Note — November 30, 2023
In response to numerous requests, I’m going to be touching on wealth building and investing every week, something I wrote about for years. I’m going to keep it short and simple. Two or three observations or…
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The Economy & Investing
Why Housing Inflation Can Be the Worst Kind
It seems like every other casual conversation I have these days drifts into the subject of the rising cost of living. In particular, the crazy cost of housing. In this essay published recently by the WSJ, Greg…
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The Economy & Investing
Money: The Ultimate Incentive
“One of the greatest ironies of the modern world,” my friend Porter Stansberry wrote in a recent post on his website,” is how few people who enjoy the cornucopia of capitalism and free markets understand even…
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The Economy & Investing
ADUs Are Hot
If you don’t know what an ADU is, you are in need of some emergency investment education. ADUs (accessory dwelling units) are miniature houses the size of a large tool shed that are outfitted as complete…
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The Economy & Investing
Will Boomers Save the Economy?
Rates Rising = Less Spending = Looming Recession. Right? That’s what I expected. I’ve been puzzled by how the Fed’s rate increases haven’t significantly reduced consumer spending. I mean I was not surprised at…
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The Economy & Investing
Alarm. Then Complacency
Addison Wiggin, bestselling author and founder of Agora Financial At 2:20 EST on Wednesday, Oct. 4, every cellphone in America went off. Did you notice? It was a mass message from the Federal Emergency…
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The Economy & Investing
Office Buildings Are Still Half-Empty
More than three years after the COVID Lockdown began and employees began working from home, the sentiment among CEOs about remote working has become increasingly negative. Almost every CEO I know is nudging…
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The Economy & Investing
Is Florida Real Estate – Any Real Estate – a Buy?
Real estate has always been my favorite investment category. That’s primarily because the long-term trend has always been up. But it’s also because, at base, real estate is not complicated. And if you do the…
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The Economy & Investing
Billionaires: The More the Merrier!
The number of billionaires in the world is shrinking. Not a good thing. Globally, billionaire wealth last year dropped by $500 billion. But in the US, the outlook is better. In 2022, the US added 55 new…
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The Economy & Investing
JH Gives Me the Inside Scoop of Self-Storage
JH Gives Me the Inside Scoop of Self-Storage After reading my post in the Aug. 15 issue, my friend Jon Herring sent this in. Good, useful information for anyone who, like me, is looking at the potential of…
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The Economy & Investing
Where High Earners Are Moving
The number of high-earning American households continues to grow. And the migration of these high earners in or out of a state can have a significant effect on tax revenues and property values. Click here for…
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The Economy & Investing
Market Sentiment Is Up. But Why?
2022 was a bad year for stock investors. Finishing at 33,147, the Dow was down 3,191 points for the year. (In percentage terms, that’s a drop of 8.8%.) That made 2022 the worst year for the Dow since 2008. But…
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The Economy & Investing
Go Woke and Go Broke
Sales for Bud Light took a dive after the marketing VP in charge of the brand deciding to boost sales by getting away from the “frat boy” image and going for a new target audience: beer drinkers that are also…
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The Economy & Investing
What It Takes to Be Middle Class in America
I’ve shared studies like this before. But I found this one from SmartAsset to be particularly useful. Take a look at these facts, for example: * It’s much harder to be middle class in the north than the south…
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The Economy & Investing
Americans Are Working Less
In one of the news feeds I read, an essay titled “Working hardly or hardly working” caught my eye. According to the author, burnout among American workers is “running rampant.” The reason? “The average…
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