Common Cents Blog
On this week’s Trading Perspectives podcast, Sam Clement and I discussed the recent upsurge in COVID-19 cases due to the Delta Variant. Would this lead to another shutdown of local economies and schools? Usher in new…
The Tokyo Olympics have finally gotten underway. Since the Japanese authorities have banned spectators, these games will probably be pretty boring to watch on the television. You don’t realize how much a raucous, engaged crowd can…
After the stellar ‘run’ the stock market has had over the last couple of years, albeit with a few hiccups along the way, a lot of investors are wondering: “is now a good time to buy?”…
Unless you really follow the markets, and I mean really follow them, you might have missed the relatively sharp drop in longer-term interest rates over the last couple of months, especially for US Treasury securities. This…
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, adopted the Declaration of Independence. This document explained why the 13 American colonies were struggling against the British Crown, and why they considered themselves no…
This past week, I made several economic presentations. During the Q&A period after one of them, a person asked if I remembered a prediction I made at a presentation on the same day the first case…
This past Wednesday was full of newsworthy events. The President met with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) concluded its 2-day meeting on monetary policy. While Putin is officially the President…
Earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced there were 9.286 million jobs available in the United States during April 2021. This was/is easily an all-time high, not even close. However, employers seem to…
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced the US economy created 559K net, new payroll jobs during May 2021. While this is a pretty gaudy number in absolute terms, it was still comfortably less…
In 2019, I compared the passing societal discourse in the United States to the disastrous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China during the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, I don’t feel as though the situation has noticeably…