23 January 2018 On 30 January, President Trump will deliver his first State of the Union speech. To be sure, the state of the US economy is healthy (I will leave it to others to assess the state of the Union). Indeed, GDP has advanced at over a 3% clip during the past nine months. … Continue reading State Of the Union: Jam Today, Cuts Tomorrow
15 December 2017 Looking into 2018, one is is reminded of the old stock market admonition that "bulls make money and bears make money, but pigs are slaughtered". In other words, let's not be greedy: the returns of the past year are highly unlikely to be repeated. In an effort to free up your time … Continue reading 2018 Strategy in Pictures: Aging Rally or More to Play For?
2 December 2017 In a swanky Washington restaurant in 1974, economist Arthur Laffer presented Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (future VP and US Secretary of Defence) a doodle on the back of a napkin. What appeared was a diagram of the now infamous “Laffer Curve”. The graph depicts the relationship between tax rates and tax … Continue reading US Tax Reform: Panacea or a Risk too Far?
22 October 2017 Investors appear convinced that stimulative G-7 monetary policies lie behind the markets’ record-setting performance. To be sure, that was the case between 2009 and 2015. During the past three years, however, I believe the impact of monetary policy has been quite neutral, the key driver of markets more recently has shifted from … Continue reading Do Markets Believe Central Banks?