In the second quarter, S&P 500 corporate earnings were down over -30% on approximately -10% lower revenues.1 Daily confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the United States continue at a pace in-line with early days of the outbreak, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ July unemployment report showed 16+ million unemployed Americans with an unemployment rate […]
Q2 earnings season came and went with very little fanfare. Of course, most financial and other news coverage seemed to be focused solely on the Covid-19 outbreak, unemployment data, politics-as-usual, and fiscal and monetary stimulus. From what I could gather, earnings were barely mentioned at all. But they should have been. Long-time readers of my […]
We’re in a moment in history where few things seem normal, and there are many unknowns. This dynamic also means that several economic data points (which I’ll detail below) have also moved into ‘first-time-in-history’ territory, which may seem worrisome, but I will argue is not inherently negative. This week’s column will take a look at […]
In the mid-1800’s, the Industrial Revolution landed in America, transforming the nature of work for nearly every American. Workers largely left their farms and homes to take their place on the factory floor, eventually moving onto assembly lines. In the decades that followed, American workers would leave the factories and move into office buildings, as […]
The U.S. budget deficit – which is the difference between what the government spends and earns (tax receipts) in a given year – soared to $3 trillion in the twelve months ending June 30, 2020. Spending rose dramatically in recent months in response to the pandemic, while tax revenue plummeted. In the month of June […]
The epicenter of the economic crisis has largely been in services, severely bruising industries like retail, hospitality, travel, food services, and airlines. As these areas of the economy struggle to survive, many technology companies have been thriving. The economy has been steadily evolving into ‘digital everything,’ and companies that build and/or service the digital infrastructure […]
In recent columns, I have written extensively about the seeming ‘disconnect’ between the economic recovery (weak) and the stock market (strong). I won’t rehash those arguments here, but the overarching takeaway is that the stock market almost always moves well in advance of an economic and earnings recovery. If an economic recovery is expected to […]
When 2020 started, two of my biggest event-driven, macro concerns were rising geopolitical tensions with Iran and the potential for a messy run-up to the presidential election. Then the pandemic happened. The ground underneath the global economy shifted astronomically, quickly, and in ways few could have anticipated. Within 30 days, the stock market had declined […]
Many readers have probably seen this stat-line before: U.S. consumer spending accounts for roughly two-thirds of total GDP.1 With U.S. GDP crossing $20 trillion in 2019, that means the consumer doled out approximately $13 trillion last year. As a category, that makes the U.S. consumer nearly as big as the entire Chinese economy (~$14 trillion) […]
