Financial Briefs – July
Anyone who earns money and files taxes can save money by planning ahead. You can always form a plan with your advisor to ensure you are not paying more than you have to.
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Weekly Market Commentary
Weekly Market Commentary
7/20/2021
Peak growth is a catchphrase with the potential to mislead. When the term is applied to the U.S. economy, it does not mean the United States economy has reached the pinnacle of growth and it’s all downhill from here. It simply means economic growth is likely to climb at a slower pace than it had previously.
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Weekly Market Commentary
7/13/2021
There was a gapers’ block in financial markets last week as equity investors slowed to see what the United States Treasury bond market was up to. U.S. Treasury bonds rallied last week. Yields on 10-year Treasuries dropped from 1.43 percent at the start of the week to 1.27 percent on Thursday.
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Weekly Market Commentary
7/6/2021
The world is about halfway back to normal. The Economist developed the Global Normalcy Index (GNI) to measure the post-pandemic return to normal. In March 2020, the GNI was 35 overall, with 100 being the normal pre-pandemic level. At the end of the second quarter, the worldwide GNI was 66, or about halfway back to normal.
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Weekly Market Commentary
6/29/2021
What begins with the letter “I”? Infrastructure is essential and sometimes taken for granted. Pipes carry drinking water to our homes, offices, and healthcare facilities, and carry away sewage and wastewater. Highways, airports, railroads, waterways, roads, and bridges make efficient transportation of goods and safe travel possible.
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Weekly Market Commentary
6/22/2021
Is that a hawk? The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) met last week. They get together eight times a year to review current economic and financial conditions, assess risks to price stability and economic growth, and adjust monetary policy accordingly.
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Weekly Market Commentary
6/15/2021
It’s transitory. It’s not transitory. It’s transitory. It’s not transitory. Media analysts were plucking the inflation daisy petals last week. On Thursday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index Summary, which showed prices were up 5 percent year-to-year.
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Weekly Market Commentary
6/8/2021
Pulling the economy out of the shed. If you’ve ever stored tools or machinery in a shed or garage for an extended period of time, you know they often need some care and repair to function properly. The same appears to be true of the pandemic economy.
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Weekly Market Commentary
6/1/2021
Are we at a tipping point? One side effect of the pandemic was a collapse in demand for oil, which led to “the largest revision to the value of the oil industry’s assets in at least a decade,” reported Collin Eaton and Sarah McFarlane of The Wall Street Journal.
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Weekly Market Commentary
5/25/2021
What do markets hate? They hate uncertainty, and recently there has been plenty of it. Some of the questions plaguing economists and pundits include: Why aren’t people returning to work?
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Weekly Market Commentary
5/18/2021
Uncle Inflation is here. Will he overstay his welcome? Ever since the financial crisis, central banks have pursued expansionary monetary policies to encourage reflation and avoid deflation. Well, it’s taken some time, but inflation is finally here.
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Weekly Market Commentary
5/11/2021
Like a gender reveal gone wrong, last week’s employment report delivered an unexpected surprise. Economists estimated 975,000 new jobs would be created in April.
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Weekly Market Commentary
5/4/2021
It’s Spring and economic recovery is in the air. Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported the U.S. economy grew at a 6.4 percent annualized rate for the first three months of 2021.
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Weekly Market Commentary
4/27/2021
It wasn’t just the price of pork chops. Last week, as investors weighed the news, strong corporate earnings were offset by higher grocery prices and rising numbers of global coronavirus cases.
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Weekly Market Commentary
4/20/2021
Where are Treasury bonds going? The direction of bond yields is influenced by investors’ expectations for economic growth, among other factors. When economic growth is expected to weaken, bond yields tend to move lower.
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Weekly Market Commentary
4/13/2021
Investors didn’t stumble over inflation last week. Why not? Inflation – rising prices of goods and services – can be measured in a variety of ways.
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Weekly Market Commentary
4/6/2021
Zoom, zoom, zoom. Big economies tend to recover from recessions about as quickly as semi-trucks accelerate from stop lights. In other words, recovery tends to be slow. That may not be the case this time.
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Weekly Market Commentary
3/30/2021
Last week, unemployment claims were looking good and consumers were feeling good. The number of Americans applying for first-time unemployment benefits declined.
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Weekly Market Commentary
3/23/2021
What are professional asset managers thinking? Bank of America recently published the results of its March global asset managers’ survey, which polls 220 professional investors responsible for about $630 billion in assets, reported Julia La Roche of Yahoo! Finance.
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Weekly Market Commentary
3/16/2021
Major stock indices in the United States soared, finishing the week higher and setting new records along the way.
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Weekly Market Commentary
3/9/2021
Neanderthal DNA may make people more – or less – susceptible to COVID-19, reported The Economist. It all depends on
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Weekly Market Commentary
3/2/2021
Students of financial markets may have noted a historically unusual event last week. On Thursday, the yield on 10-year U.S.
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Weekly Market Commentary
2/23/2021
It’s a contrarian’s dream come true. Contrarian investors like to buck the trend. They buy when other investors are selling
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Weekly Market Commentary
2/16/2021
Way back, when radio disk jockeys played 45-rpm vinyl singles, the A-side of a disk was the song the record
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Weekly Market Commentary
2/9/2021
It’s not a black diamond ski run yet, but the yield curve for U.S. Treasuries is steeper than it has
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Weekly Market Commentary
2/2/2021
They say people watching the same event often see different things. That seems to have been the case last week
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