Weekly Financial Market Updates

  This week we received survey data on the state of consumer confidence in the U.S. The punchline: Consumers are feeling a bit better. The Conference Board publishes a monthly survey of consumer confidence. As you might imagine, confidence slumped mightily in March and April on the back of the COVID-19 scare.  But May’s survey…

  There’s been a lot of gloom and doom with economic data in recent weeks. Question is: are there any signs of things turning around? The answer is YES!  There are dozens of economic indicators that are released in a given month. The problem with most of these statistics is that they’re stale, measuring what…

This week Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Jerome Powell, gave a speech about current monetary policy. Market rumors of negative interest rates have increased in recent weeks. What did he say about that? In response to the COVID epidemic spreading in March, the Federal Reserve took aggressive action to cut interest rates to near 0%. Their…

One of the puzzling things we’ve seen the last two months since the COVID crisis washed ashore in the U.S. is the dichotomy between the real economy and the stock market. On one side, the real economy is posting its worst performance since the Great Depression. Yet on the other side, the stock market is…