Last week my family and I went on a summer vacation. While traveling I was amazed to discover just how many merchants no longer accept cash as a form of payment. This transition to a cashless society has been coming for a while but the pandemic certainly sped the whole [...]
It’s been about 15 years now since we had our last true recession. Last year nearly everyone, including yours truly, expected a recession to take hold by spring of this year. As it goes with most things with the stock market, when most people expect something, it usually does the [...]
In behavioral psychology there is a principle called risk aversion theory. The concept states the human mind has a naturally tendency to feel the pain of losses more than the pleasure of gains. For many investors who saw their accounts drop by more than 20% in 2022 they are probably [...]
The late great baseball legend, Yogi Berra, is credited with this quotation: It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future! If there were a perfect field for applying this, investing must be it. Our viewpoint (and that of our favorite economists at First Trust Advisors, LP) remains that [...]
This probably won’t come as a shock to those of you who regularly read my column, but I am a big fan of talk radio. While making the commute to and from work each day I enjoy getting information about what is happening both locally and nationally through this medium. [...]
Years ago now, in 2009 and following, I joined a small minority of economists critical of the Zero Interest Rate Policy chosen by Ben Bernanke and others in charge of the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) to cure the Mortgage Bond crisis. The current crisis is a direct consequence of over [...]
While it will be several weeks before we have a clear picture on total retail sales this holiday season, we do know that it started very poorly with November sales numbers, typically the highest month of the entire year, actually dropping .6% when compared to October. Many on Wall Street have interpreted [...]
Recently the crypto industry was rocked to its core with the collapse of the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world FTX, and the still developing scandal revolving around the alleged securities fraud committed by its founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. With a value as high as 32 billion weeks [...]
With Halloween less than a week away, I thought there would be no better time to write an article on the undead. Yes, that’s right. This week I am going to opine on the topic of zombies and warn you all that a zombie apocalypse could be right around the [...]
In the 1980 presidential election debates, Ronald Reagan began his famous quip, Well . . . There you go again! Sometimes it seems we cannot learn from our mistakes. Today I will connect some dots of seemingly unrelated ideas and decisions that have made life in these United States more [...]
