December 8, 2020, Last week’s reading on employment was the last we will see in 2020. We believe that we have had enough bad economic news this year and are looking for a better year in 2021. The gain of 245,000 jobs was seen as disappointing, as the gain in jobs has slowed significantly as […]
November 24, 2020 The prognosticators had promised Armageddon for the economy when the pandemic hit. Don’t get us wrong–it was plenty bad. But it was not as bad as many had predicted. The main reason for this resiliency? The real estate market. This is somewhat poetic justice because the Great Recession of 2008 was led […]
November 17, 2020 The election is over, and the analysts have spent two weeks telling us what the results mean. The stock market rallied just before and after the election was called, but we don’t know if that was just the euphoria of uncertainty being removed, or the start of a longer-term rally — especially […]
May 19, 2020 Some states have begun opening up. We are starting to see the “new normal” we spoke about, but for now this normalcy does not seem to be very normal. The best description of our moving forward is not turning on a light switch, but turning on a light with a dimmer. And […]
March 24, 2020 Believe it or not, we started the year quite smoothly. Yes, we were expecting some excitement due to the fact that we had a Presidential election coming our way. Little did we know that the primaries would take a back-seat to something much larger. It took just a few weeks to go […]
January 14, 2020 The numbers are in for 2019. We will start with jobs, as the December report was just released last week. The month’s numbers generally were slightly disappointing, which is good news for the economy and interest rates, as it is in line with predictions of slower growth but no recession. For the […]
December 10, 2019 You only have to read these predictions to understand the importance of this week’s employment report — Two Federal Reserve estimates of U.S. economic growth are predicting that gross domestic product will hardly expand in the fourth quarter. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimated that growth is likely to come in at just 0.3%, down […]
November 5, 2019 Today is Election Day. If you watch the news every day you might get the impression that the only important races are Federal. However, in the “off” years, there are a slew of local races and even a few state-wide races being contested. The local representatives you vote for today might become […]
July 30, 2019 What is happening with the job market? That is a question we have not had to answer for several years because job growth has been consistently positive. And though the job market continues to be strong in 2019, we can no longer use the word consistent from month-to-month. Since January we have […]
March 19, 2019 A bit over one week after the February jobs report, the Federal Reserve Board convenes today to determine the present and future of monetary policy. As far as the analysts are concerned, there is not much concern about the present. There is no action expected to be announced with regard to the […]