Investing

On Thursday, September 12, the European Central Bank cut interest rates and re-activated its program to buy government bonds. The Federal Reserve is expected to cut interest rates at its next meeting this month. Both of these moves are to help “stave off” an economic slowdown. As a result, stock indexes here in the U.S. and…

On the first Friday of every month, the government releases employment statistics for the previous month. The financial press always seems to build these releases as “the biggest release of the year.” Indeed, this month‘s release of August payrolls will answer a lot of questions about how aggressive the Federal Reserve will cut rates at its…

There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about low interest rates and inverted yield curves. One newsworthy item that is being missed is how mortgage rates have dropped. As recently as last November, mortgage rates were approaching 5.00%. Now they’ve dropped all the way to 3.55% based on the latest survey from…

Last week we talked about an inverted yield curve and how many commentators believe that leads to recession. This week we’re going to look closer at what typically happens in a recession. The first thing to remember is that recessions are not uncommon. As mentioned in last week’s post, they happen on average about every…

It’s been another volatile week in the stock market. The big worry this week is that the “yield curve” inverted for the first time in 12 years. But what does that mean and why do people think that’s significant? Let’s have a look. Yield Curve, Defined The yield curve is a plot of U.S. Government…

If you were gone for the financial week on vacation, you might look at the S&P 500 and think that it was a quiet week in the market. The index is pretty much exactly where it was on Friday August 2. But did you know that the Dow Industrials were down over 750 points on…