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Market Outlooks
Weekly Wire: Bizarro bonds – guaranteed to lose you money, and not just in a comic strip
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Fans of Superman – or Seinfeld – may be familiar with Bizarro World, a cubed planet far out in space that is inhabited by imperfect duplicates of Superman, Lois Lane, and their friends. In a nutshell, on Bizarro – relative to earth – up is down, hot is cold, good is bad, and beautiful is ugly.
Market Outlooks
Weekly Wire: What did the Fed just do? Why? What comes next?
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Last week, the Federal Open Market Committee, the monetary policymaking body of the US Federal Reserve (Fed), met and announced it was lowering the Federal Funds rate by 25 bps (the first interest rate cut in more than 10 years) to a range of 2.0% to 2.25% and ending the runoff of its $3.8 trillion asset portfolio. Before we examine why the Fed took these two very important steps to support the US economy, a bit of background.
Advisor Value & Fees
Traits of great financial advisors
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You probably know by now that you’re supposed to have a financial advisor, you may just not know how to differentiate the good ones from the bad ones. We’d like to suggest the following as a checklist for helping you to find an advisor who can help you meet your financial goals and have a good time doing it.
Market Outlooks
Baby boom – Great for economic growth, but there isn’t one in sight
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At a high level, two factors drive economic growth: 1. growth in a labor force (e.g. more people working this year versus last year) 2. growth in productivity (e.g. people producing more this year versus last year). So, the basic formula for growing an economy is people + productivity = economic growth.
Market Outlooks
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back!
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A hallmark of the Great Recession was a decline in the prime age labor force participation rate from 83% to 80%, see the chart below. While a three-point drop might not seem significant, it reflects millions of Americans walking away from the economy, giving up on ever finding gainful employment.
Market Outlooks
It’s a big birthday for the bull market, and we see a successful quest for greater gains
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Happy birthday bull market! The longest running bull market in United States history hit a major milestone last week, turning 10 on March 9. It sure has been an interesting and exciting 10 years.
Market Outlooks
Equity and fixed income return volatility
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People need no help picturing equity return volatility. Anyone invested in the equity market in the middle 2000s still likely feels the scars from the subprime mortgage crisis. Prior to that, there was the dot com burst of the early 2000s.