United States
The conventional wisdom is wrong: Trump is not going to substantially cut taxes once in office; he is going to raise taxes by jacking up tariffs. To the extent that this dampens economic activity, it is bad news for stocks but good news for bonds.
The disinflationary trend in US CPI continued in June as headline CPI dipped to 3% year-over-year, down from 3.3% in May, and core CPI declined by a tick to 3.3%. On a month-over-month basis, headline prices fell by 0.1% and core prices rose by 0.1%. One…
An investor looking at the low unemployment rate and elevated job vacancy rate could reasonably conclude that the US expansion will continue. However history suggests that recessions often start seemingly out of the blue. Solid growth in the fourth quarter…
In light of last week’s employment report and this morning’s CPI, it’s time for the Federal Reserve to cut rates.
The NFIB Small Business Optimism (SBO) index climbed from 90.5 to 91.5 in June, the highest print this year, topping consensus expectations of a softening to 90.2. On the surface, this appears to be good news. Indeed, small businesses are particularly…
US Core CPI inflation has decelerated considerably from its year-over-year peak of 6.6% in September 2022 to 3.4% in May and the consensus expects it remained at 3.4% in June. The year-over-year number has come down continuously, albeit fitfully, over the…
We consider the outlook for CPI inflation over the next 12 months. Our baseline forecast calls for core CPI to hit 2.40% during this timeframe and for headline CPI to fall between 1.74% and 2.49%.
Our US Investment strategists define excess savings as the difference between what households saved beginning in March 2020 and what they might have saved had the pandemic not occurred. To estimate the latter, they assumed that disposable income would have…
Our US Investment Strategy colleagues have kept a close eye on excess savings and their disposition since the CARES Act funds began to flow in the spring of 2020. Their conviction that the consensus failed to recognize the consumption potential inherent in…
Participants in the Philly Fed’s Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) assign a 26% probability to a contraction in US real GDP four quarters from now, down from their 44% peak probability in 2022. The unwieldy contraction-in-four-quarters wording makes…