The closest parallel is the post-World War II era, which led to massive economic and societal changes. Pandemic lockdowns are coming to an end in the U.S., and with them, a massive economic recovery has begun. The closest parallel is the post-World War II era. That period created a massive societal "reset" in terms of employment, ...

The legendary fund manager is an ultra long-term holder of equities, holding out for the big score. Imagine you are an institutional broker in the 1970s, buying small-cap companies such as McDonald’s, Disney, Federal Express, Nike, Mattel, Hyatt and some others. Between $1 billion and $3 billion, they were considered small-cap. You would ...

Fidelity’s Will Danoff, who manages the Contrafund, gives some insight into his remarkable track record. Will Danoff is an outlier. He is the sole manager of Fidelity Investments’ storied Contrafund, which is a $139 billion large-cap growth fund. No one else in the country runs a fund that big by themselves. What’s more impressive is that ...

So many of the most battered industries don’t matter much because of the way stock indexes are structured. The stock market has been on a tear, yet the economy is in the dumps. So why do so many people believe -- undoubtedly incorrectly -- that the stock market has decoupled from reality? The economy many people experience, while bleak, is ...

The question is whether it’s saying anything meaningful about the odds of recession. The yield curve just inverted -- again. Driven by fears of a potential coronavirus pandemic that could cause widespread economic disruption, investment capital sought shelter in longer-term bonds. This flight to safety caused the curve to invert, at least ...

The big money manager found a way to defer taxes on mutual-fund capital gains via exchange-traded funds.Last week’s big story about Vanguard Group’s patented tax dodge raised some interesting legal and tax issues. Our charge today is to try and take a slightly deeper look at what Vanguard has been doing and why. Let’s start with some basics ...

Here's a question: Is the broker who advises you on your retirement account on your side?The answer is at the heart of the debate over the proposed Department of Labor fiduciary rules. Applying a fiduciary standard means the broker must put his customer's interests ahead of his own. This is different from now, when nothing stops a broker ...

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.--Robert SolowGovernment data this morning showed that the U.S. gained 215,000 new jobs last month. Unemployment ticked up to 5 percent from 4.9 percent, as more people returned to the labor force. Wages increased 0.3 percent month to month, and are up 2.3 percent year ...

I spend a decent amount of time traveling around the U.S. speaking at conferences and visiting clients. Doing this is a visceral form of economic research -- you can see just how various regions are recovering and expanding with your own eyes.It doesn't take much to realize that, to paraphrase science fiction writer William Gibson, the recovery ...

The recent financial market volatility has many people wondering if this stock-market decline will turn into a bear market. Others are wondering if a recession is imminent. Still others wonder if a full-blown market crash or a financial crisis like 2008 is in the offing.I don't claim to have the answer to those questions. However, I do have ...

This week, the real estate mogul and billionaire Sam Zell said, "There is a high probability that we are looking at a recession in the next 12 months." The culprit, he told "Bloomberg Go," was the strong dollar and slowing global trade, the beginnings of layoffs at multinational companies and a general lack of demand. The bears of the ...

Calling this the "worst economic expansion since World War II" is like saying the ebola virus is the worst cold you ever had. At some level you might be technically correct, but you end up communicating confusing, even misleading, information.This keeps coming up, despite a wealth of evidence that provides more appropriate context about the ...

The preoccupation with all of the things that could possibly go wrong has been a persistent characteristic of this economic recovery. It was termed recession porn in 2009. It has been a focus of websites, pundits and, of course, goldbugs. When an economist picks up the nickname "Dr. Doom," it suggests an obsession with the negative.
Recession ...

There was some pushback on yesterday's rather tame suggestion that the U.S. properly finance the fund that pays to maintain and repair our roads. Much of the correspondence was surprising. Then again, I am continually flabbergasted by the cognitive errors that the human brain can make. It's a marvelously designed piece of wetware that does a ...

I have been fairly agnostic on several issues related to where interest rates are heading. It has never been my job to forecast where the 10-year yield will be in six months. Not predicting and not caring are two very different things, however. Rates matter a great deal -- to investors, to the economy and most of all to debtors of every ...

Of all the maddening things about this month's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, perhaps the single most annoying is the hoopla surrounding the so-called dot plot. It even has its own Twitter hashtag: #Dotplot.
The dot plot is a chart that shows the expectations of each FOMC member -- absent their names -- for where they believe the ...

Today's employment report may be hard to read: The severe weather in the Northeast and Midwest affected the Labor Department's data-collection process. The weather has been so disruptive that department employees can't even get into the office on time to release this morning's report. For the first time ever, it's being released online.
But as ...

One of my favorite thought experiments is the careful-what-you-wish-for scenario. I was reminded of its utility during Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen's Congressional testimony the other day.
Consider the critique of the Fed by some members of Congress. As the New York Times described it, the three-hour hearing was "testy" as "Republicans ...

Last week, we learned that Wal-Mart was giving the lowest paid of its hourly employees a raise. In a blog post, Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon said that as of April, the company will pay a minimum of $9 an hour. That is $1.75 more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25, which has been unchanged for almost six years. Next ...

All of the job growth from 2007 to today can easily be attributed to the shale oil fracking situation and the oil Renaissance. If you take Texas and North Dakota out of the data series for job employment, what you see is that we haven't added any jobs in the United States other than those ...

Central bankers, most of them versed in the history of the Great Depression and deflation, haven't been exactly reading from the same hymnal for the past few years. There are signs, though, that this might be changing.
Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, but the U.S., with the most activist central bank and after more than five years ...

I never intended to become the conduit between employees at Pacific Investment Management Company and the public at large. Yet lately, that seems to be the role I have been playing with the bond giant, especially in commentary and criticism of co-founder Bill Gross -- whether it is "Friends of Bill" informing me about his unpublished ...

The bond market seems to have had its own flash crash this week. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond dipped briefly below 2 percent, as panicked equity sellers looked for a safe place to park their cash. Treasuries, of course, are the world's option of choice, the safest and most liquid port during the storm. Demand for bonds has ...