Over the past few months, politicians and the mainstream media have been applauding the fact that inflation has “finally been brought under control.” The headline data certainly reflects this, as the consumer price index has fallen from a peak of 9.1% year-over-year in June 2022 to 5.0% in March: However, this is somewhat misleading. As…
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Gas And Oil Prices Rise, Likely To Continue
On Tuesday, April 18, 2023, fuel price tracking company GasBuddy reported that the average price of gasoline in the United States reached its highest price this year. The company stated that the average price of gasoline in the United States is now $3.65 per gallon, which represents a $0.076 increase over the past week. This…
Weakness In The Petrodollar Could Benefit Gold
Over the past few weeks, I have been seeing a number of articles on various sites discussing how the U.S. dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency could be under attack. Over the past several years, I have even made similar comments through articles such as these: I have done a few more articles than…
Signs Of A Worsening Jobs Market
Over the past few months, I have been writing about how the jobs market has been somewhat resilient despite the fact that there are numerous signs of economic weakening. We are now finally starting to see job numbers pointing to an impending recession. ADP And BLS Data The first recent data point comes from Automatic…
The U.S. Consumer Is Hitting A Brick Wall, Negatively Impacting Discretionary Stocks
In numerous recent articles, I have stated that there are a growing number of signs that the U.S. consumer may be reaching a breaking point. When we consider that consumer spending currently comprises approximately 70% of the American gross domestic product, that could be a very big problem for the economy. This is particularly true…
Solar Power: Not A Cheap Source Of Energy
A few weeks ago, Zero Hedge published a rather insightful article written by Isaac Orr at RealClearPolicy.com. While that site is reviled among some commentators in the broader media, fact-checkers and media bias sites do rank it fairly respectably: With that said, I personally have no particular bias as I limit my analysis to economics…
The Impact Of Silicon Valley Bank On The Market
For the past few days, I have been having flashbacks to 2008. I was certainly not as knowledgeable about the capital markets then, but I still recall the concern that I felt when Lehman Brothers collapsed. As the Federal Reserve began to slash interest rates and the Troubled Asset Relief Program was implemented to bail…
The Jobs Data Continues To Get Worse
A few weeks ago, I published an article on TalkMarkets that showed how the jobs market appears to be worse than what the media and the Federal Government are leading people to believe. We saw further evidence of that earlier today as Meta Platforms (META), which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and various other popular social…