Pull the trigger with confidence.

The final stats are in for fiscal year 2024, and the federal debt in the U.S. grew by $2.297 trillion versus a year earlier, and as of Sep. 30, 2024, the total debt stood at $35.465 trillion. 

Those who are fans of the fine print will note that on the very next day, Oct. 1, 2024, the total debt jumped by another $204 billion, or 8.9% of last year's debt increase, as the folks at the Treasury Department unleashed a bunch of bill payments that they held back to make FY2024 look better.  If... Read More

The drop in the number of publicly traded U.S. companies is continuing.  I last reported on that here back in April.  Since then, the losses in the Nasdaq have leveled off just a little bit, but the NYSE continues to lose listed issues.

Several different factors have affected these totals over time, the most prominent of which is the availability of liquidity.  In the growth years of the 1990s, when Alan Greenspan was starting to worry about "irrational exuberance" (1996), both markets saw... Read More

The folks at Cass Information Systems spend their time gathering a lot of data about how much money gets spent on shipping things, and their data show that the U.S. is already in a recession of economic activity.  This week's chart features a fun comparison I put together, comparing the Cass Truckload Linehaul Index to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on total U.S. manufacturing employment. 

From Cass' website: "Cass Truckload Linehaul Index is a measure of market fluctuations in... Read More

The money supply measure known as M2 has still been growing, but not as fast as GDP.  The net result is that the ratio of M2/GDP has continued to shrink since its peak in June 2020 during all of the Covid Crash hoopla.  Why that matters is the subject of this week's chart.

A couple of months ago, I heard economist Steve Hanke talk about this in an interview.  Hanke is Professor of Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins.  He noted that there is a 23-month lag between changes in money supply and... Read More

There is an extremely long term cycle of 42-44 years in the ratio of gold prices to wheat prices, and it is due for a top now.  That word "now" needs to be interpreted extremely loosely, given the long nature of this cycle's period, and its slight imprecision.

Going back to the late 1700, there has been an important top in the ratio of gold to wheat prices every 42-44 years.  The last one of these was in 1980, when the big gold bubble of the late 1970s reached its climax.

For the... Read More

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell stated in his August 23, 2024 Jackson Hole speech that it is time for the Fed to change its stance on interest rates.  He all but guaranteed that the FOMC would be cutting rates at its Sep. 17-18, 2024 meeting, although of course he did not say by how much.

So why is this happening now?  There are two big reasons for this timing.  The first has to do with rising unemployment, as depicted in the chart above.  The U.S. unemployment rate has a very strong positive... Read More

We are now in the rough part of the year for the stock market, when annual seasonality favors the bears.  Everyone by now has heard the phrase created by the late Yale Hirsch, "Sell in May and go away."  It is a great rhyming phrase, but over the years since Hirsch came up with it, the actual seasonal top has shifted a little bit into July.  And there is just not as catchy a rhyming phrase that starts out "Sell in July...."

Earlier in 2024, the DJIA was not following its Annual Seasonal... Read More

The Bank of Japan raised its key interest rate target on July 31, 2024 from 0.1% to 0.25%.  That is an empirically tiny raise, but it caused earthquakes around the globe because of what it did to players in the financial markets.  And that brought about a big shift in the Commitment of Traders (COT) Report data, as seen in this week's chart. 

Having the BoJ raise its short term rate meant that borrowing money from banks in yen immediately got just a little bit more expensive.  And it also... Read More