A Black Swan?

I wrote about the most recent Black Swan event in this and our sister publication in the spring of 2020. I first wrote about the fear that was gripping Milan, Italy, as ground zero in the West for the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, and I worried about how rapidly and how far it could spread. As we know, it turned…

Read More

Here Comes the Great Insurance Crisis

Fifty billion dollars. That is $50,000 million. I like to use that analogy so that readers can understand the magnitude of a billion dollars, which is $1,000 million. That is what the devastation in Southern California’s recent fires cost. Insurance is one of the great gifts of finance to mankind. Through the statistical magic of risk pooling, an individual can…

Read More

The Population Growth Recovery

I have had a fascination with U.S. population numbers since I had to write a paper in high school about how population growth affects our economy. That was 55-plus years ago, and I have continued to watch the topic with great interest. Much has changed since the late 1960s, and sometimes demographers miss the boat as they have in the…

Read More

The Consumer Strengthens

“It’s all over but the shouting.” The expression’s first use in print was in 1842, by Welsh sportswriter Charles James Apperley when reporting a late score in a sporting event. As so it is with the election, but as I have said many times before, election outcomes have near-zero impact on our businesses, and life goes on. Even before the…

Read More

A No Landing?

You would have to be living under a rock not to see the tear the stock markets are on, and especially the construction materials subset of companies that supply aggregates, cement and ready mixed concrete; and that are all breaking through previous records to all-time highs. And jobs reports continue to be strong, and in a strange dichotomy, the consumer…

Read More

The Fed Goes Big

That was the subject line on an end-of-day email from one of the major business media enterprises on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-September. It was the day the Fed held its regular meeting, and ended speculation as to whether the all-but-assured rate cut would be 25 basis points, or a more aggressive 50 points. And 50 it was, but it…

Read More

A Mid-Year Look at the Housing Market

Interest rates have been elevated for a long time now, a stretch spanning the longest period for high interest rates that we can remember. Starting in March 2022, rates have ratcheted up to their current levels and have been there for 2½ years now. But as I have been predicting for some time, rates will come down, although the timing…

Read More
1 2 3 8