05/16/2020 Today
Neil Paine, FiveThirtyEight On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that 2.98 million more Americans had filed for unemployment insurance in the previous week, bringing the total for claims since March 8 up to 36.8 million. Last week’s jobs report for the month of April estimated the national unemployment rate at 14.7 percent, and Thursday’s report implies that perhaps another 2.5 percent of the labor force has filed for benefits since the beginning of May.1 It’s a grim situation, though not every area has been hit equally hard. So which parts of the economy have... |
Maheshwari & Friedman, NYT J. Crew and Neiman Marcus were each facing a host of issues before the coronavirus pandemic forced them to close their stores and eventually file for bankruptcy, including trouble adjusting to the rise of e-commerce and a lack of connection with a new generation of shoppers. But they also shared one increasingly common problem for retailers in dire straits: an enormous debt burden — roughly $1.7 billion for J. Crew; almost $5 billion for Neiman Marcus — from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms. Like many other retailers, J. Crew and Neiman during the past decade paid... |
John Tamny, RCM "I would trade almost anything to play the oboe." Those are the words of Blaire Tindall in her book, Mozart In the Jungle. Some readers are familiar with the television show of the same... |
Timothy O'Brien, Bloomberg (Bloomberg Opinion) -- We have had much of Elon Musk.We've had Musk smoking weed and sipping whiskey on a radio show while assessing humanity: "We're all chimps. We're one notch. One notch above a chimp. ? If you watch some show like 'Naked and Afraid,' or, you know, if you just go and try living in |
Jeffrey Tucker, American Institute for Economic Research Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages. There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence. How... |
Spencer Bokat-Lindell, NYT If you’re a parent stuck at home with young children — or, hypothetically speaking, if you’re a childless millennial stuck in a dictionary-size Brooklyn apartment below another dictionary-size Brooklyn apartment in which said parent is having trouble keeping said young children quiet — you are probably wondering when they can go back to school. |
Landon, Jain & Arora, The Hill The COVID-19 global pandemic continues to spread and impact the lives of the children who are out of school, the senior citizens who are most vulnerable to the virus, and pretty much everyone in between. To halt the spread, much of the nation has been social distancing and sheltering in place for over a month now. The good news is the curve is starting to show signs of flattening in certain parts of the country, bringing to light the urgent question on everyone’s mind: when can we reopen? The most compelling reason to reopen is the need to reinvigorate our economy and provide... |
Michael Posner, Forbes The coronavirus crisis reveals deep fissures that have long existed in our country. “Economic Dignity,” a new book by Gene Sperling, a former national economic advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, provides important insight into some of those chasms related to economic inequality. In a vivid and timely way, Sperling’s book highlights the “dissonance between our nation’s labeling of workers as ‘essential’ and ‘heroes’ and their limited wages, benefits and ability to organize.” |
Milton Ezrati, City Journal The Payroll Protection Program (PPP), a massive federal aid program meant to help small businesses stay afloat and sustain payrolls during the antivirus shutdowns and quarantines, has attracted considerable criticism, including accusations of corruption. Lawyers have filed suits, congressional representatives have complained, and journalists have highlighted abuses. While abuses have likely occurred, PPP aid nonetheless seems to have flowed quickly to the small businesses that it was intended to help. Launched in early April as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act and intended to help firms with... |
Jordan Weissmann, Slate When banks got done making their first batch of loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, the results looked like a quiet “red state bailout,” as the Atlantic’s David Frum put it. The quickly depleted funds had disproportionately aided smaller, more rural states in the middle of the country that just happened to have voted for Donald Trump in 2016—to the relative neglect of blue states that had been hit harder by the coronavirus pandemic. PPP’s second stage, however, is shaping up differently. As the Economic Innovation... |
Robert Robb, Arizona Republic The math of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest bailout legislation, misleadingly called the Heroes Act, is mind-boggling. It leads my boggled mind to dust off a 60-year-old idea of Milton Friedman’s: The negative income tax. There has already been roughly $3 trillion in coronavirus response spending approved. The Heroes Act contains another $3 trillion, for a total of $6 trillion. Only a fraction of this is to pay for direct COVID-19 related health-care expenses. The bulk of it is to prop up the economy in one way or another. |
Sean Williams, MF For the past two months, mitigation measures meant to halt the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy and labor market. We've seen more than 33 million initial unemployment benefit claims filed, and the unemployment rate has rocketed from 50-year lows of sub-4% to Great Depression levels of 14.7%. While these measures were deemed necessary to prevent additional loss of life tied to COVID-19, it's left many working Americans in dire financial shape. That's why, on March 27, Congress passed and President Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief,... |
Jerry Bowyer, Vident Financial |
John Holt, Applied Finance Over the past 25 years, Applied Finance has studied market patterns and trends using millions of Valuations. The firm's live database goes back to 1998, with further data starting from the early 1990's. The two [...more] |
Rob Williams, Charles Schwab Important distinctions exist between traditional and Roth IRAs, including eligibility and contribution limits. Here's a guide to help you decide what's best for you. |
Brian Wesbury & Robert Stein, First Trust Advisors |
Richard Moody, Regions Bank |
Hayden Adams, Charles Schwab Was your tax refund smaller than in previous years? Did you owe more than usual? Here's why. |
Richard Moody, Regions Bank |
Ray Dalio, CNN Business We need to reform capitalism, but certainly not abandon it, writes Ray Dalio, the founder, co-chief investment officer and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates. |
Howard Gold, MarketWatch The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway seems to prefer the S&P 500 to his own company?s stock |
Eliza Griswold, The New Yorker The disaster has become so dire so quickly owing, in part, to the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. |
Lawrence Summers, Financial Times The pandemic will be remembered alongside 1914 Archduke assassination and 1938 Munich Conference |
Jose Antonio Gonzalez Anaya, Project Syndicate It is impossible to say what will happen to oil prices as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and global recession. But there are signs that, though demand will take time to recover, supply may be adjusted faster than during past crises. |
John Rekenthaler, Morningstar How to do something different, without doing something bad? |
Theodore Schleifer, Vox What a viral headline about Jeff Bezos becoming a trillionaire gets right and wrong |
Howard Lindzon, HL The first half of 2020 had been a great century of investing. |
Liam Vaughan, BBW A new book reveals fresh details about the man authorities blamed for the Flash Crash that erased $1 trillion of value in a matter of minutes. |
Veronique de Rugy, Reason Marveling at people's endless ability to love, connect, and create. |
Brooke Jarvis, Wired The very first vaccine candidate entered human trials—and Neal Browning’s arm—on March 16. Behind the scenes at Moderna and the beginning of an unprecedented global sprint. |
Chris Isidore, CNN Business It hasn't received a lot of attention with all the Twitter wars and comments from CEO Elon Musk about Covid-19, but Tesla has become incredibly profitable. |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments |
Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory A truth that’s told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent. William Blake (1757 – 1827) |
Ed Yardeni, Dr. Ed's Blog We are still in the midst of VWW-II, the second world war against the coronavirus. VWW-I occurred from 1918-19 as the world battled the Spa... |
Sheldon Richman, Free Association It’s time for the lockdown orders to be lifted, liberating society’s widespread entrepreneurial problem-solving process to do its thing. |
Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund Life is a little easier if you expect a certain percentage of it to go wrong no matter how hard you try. |
Preston Caldwell, Morningstar We've updated our near-term GDP forecast and look to previous recessions for longer-term guidance. |
Ben Carlson, A Wealth Of Common Sense A reader sent me an old piece I wrote in early-2014 that contained a stat that made me do a double-take: The energy sector outperformed the S&P 500 by nearly 7% per year with nearly the same standard deviation. This seems almost impossible to believe at the moment but it really happened. |
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Project Syndicate To those already predisposed to favor domestic production over international trade, the COVID-19 pandemic seems like a case in point. Yet a closer look at the facts shows that, if anything, the current crisis offers powerful evidence of why we need global supply chains and widely distributed production. | |
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