Common Cents Blog
This week, I spoke at two different conferences in Nashville, one on Tuesday morning and the other on Thursday. It was essentially the same presentation. I told the same jokes and spewed the same data. The…
This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for March 2024. It was only slightly higher than analysts had been expecting, 0.4% for the month, but you would have thought…
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released “The Employment Situation – March 2024.” In it, the BLS estimated the U.S. economy created 303K net, new payroll jobs last month. This was higher than analysts…
I am currently reading Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year. It is a fictionalized account of the bubonic plague outbreak in London which reached its peak in 1665. These days, it is…
This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a primary inflation gauge, increased 0.4% during February 2024. Over the last 12-months, it is 3.2% higher. My first reaction was…
Yesterday, I had lunch at a Thai restaurant with a classmate of mine from high school. To say this guy is smart would be a massive understatement and do him a great disservice in the process.…
If I were in the Biden Administration, I would be pretty confused by the disconnect between the economic data and the general public’s perception of it. After all, the stock market has been rocking along nicely.…
Arguably, the biggest story this past week was NVIDIA Corporation’s (NVDA) most recent earnings report. While it was true the economic calendar was pretty light, investors were anxious to see how the company fared last quarter.…
As we all know, 2023 ended on a very high note. The economy grew at a relatively feverish pace during the last two quarters of the year, and the stock market rallied like nobody’s business in…
Recently, the markets and economic data have been better than just about everyone expected they would be. As a result, this past week has been about as smooth as any over the last several years. After…