Common Cents Blog
At 1:00 pm CST on December 18, the Federal Reserve announced the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) had decided to cut the target overnight rate by 25 basis points (0.25%). This will take the upper band…
If nothing else, the events of the last couple of years have taught me that American investors apparently don’t bother to read the headlines any longer. I mean, how else can you explain the stock market’s…
Just about everyone is probably familiar with the movie Field of Dreams. As you know, it is a better-than-average ghost story about a farmer, Ray Kinsella, in Iowa, who builds a baseball field on his farm.…
My first professional employer was a firm in Baltimore by the name of Mercantile Bankshares (MSD&T). In the early to mid-1990s, it was what you might call the “white shoes” bank and trust department in town,…
Last night, I went to Winn-Dixie to get mouthwash and toothpaste. Nothing more. By the time I got to the checkout line, I had a 16-lb. frozen Butterball turkey, 4 boxes of Kraft Velveeta shells &…
Here we are, over a week later. The world has not stopped revolving. The sun has continued to rise in the East. No one has paved the streets with gold. In fact, not much has changed…
My alarm goes off at 5:30 am every workday morning, and this past Wednesday was no exception. Having gone to bed around 9:30 pm on Tuesday night, I immediately checked the Associated Press (AP) app on…
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released “The Employment Situation – October 2024,” otherwise known as the jobs report. Unless you are a complete Pollyanna, it wasn’t good. The U.S. economy apparently created 12K…
This week, Sam Clement and I discussed the restaurant industry on our “Trading Perspectives” podcast. Most specifically, we talked about what appears to be a significant change in consumer behavior and how this will impact the…
This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for September 2024. It reported the aggregate CPI was up 0.2% last month, and has increased 2.4% over the previous 12…