Many had predicted that 2023 would be an extremely difficult year for the financial markets, but instead, both the stock and bond markets demonstrated remarkable resilience adapting to the new realities of higher interest rates and persistent inflation. After a challenging 2022, we saw a strong rebound with the Russell 3000 up over 25%, the…
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The end of the third quarter of 2023 brought some challenges in the financial markets. The S&P 500 fell -4.9% in September and the MSCI All Country World index dropped -5.08% for the month, driven by a sudden spike in long term interest rates. That was in the context of some dour headlines, including: And that…
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The debt ceiling debate is dominating the headlines. In a nutshell, the debt ceiling is a limit that is set by the U.S. Congress on the total amount of debt that the Federal government is legally allowed to borrow. Since the 1960’s, the debt ceiling has been raised a total of 78 times. There have been…
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As the market accepted the reality of higher interest rates, a likely recession, and heightened uncertainty, both equity and bond markets continued their decline. Below are the asset class returns for 3Q of 2022. The news media would like us to believe that these declines are the result of a world spinning out…
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With inflation and recession fears dominating headlines, both stocks and bonds continued their fall in the second quarter of 2022. At times, it useful to put short term market conditions in the context of longer market cycles. If we go back to the January 1, 2009, we observe that the S&P 500 (with dividends reinvested)…
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Earlier this month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for All Urban Consumers had risen 8.5% for the 12-month period ending March 31, 2022. This marked the fourth consecutive month where the annual CPI rate was 7% or more. When it comes to the reality of higher inflation,…
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As the global pandemic extended into 2021, the markets continued the remarkable run that began the third week of March 2020. Since that time, US large company stocks, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, have more than doubled in value. For 2021, the broad US stock market generated a positive return of more than…
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On August 31, 2021, the Social Security Board of Trustees released its annual report, which included the latest projection for the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund. According to the report, if Congress does not act, the fund is projected to become depleted by 2033, a year sooner than the estimate provided in 2020.…
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The annual change in the Consumer Price Index “CPI” exceeded more than 5% for the second month in a row, raising concern that we may be entering an inflationary period. How concerned should investors be? Before we get into that, we should begin with a short primer on what inflation is. Inflation refers to an…
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As explained in our article on “How to Evaluate a Mortgage Refinance”, the decision to refinance comes down to evaluating the benefit of the interest savings against the costs of the refi. A traditional approach to evaluating this tradeoff is to calculate a payback period, which is defined as the number of months it takes…
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