Every year United Van Lines performs its National Movers Study, analyzing where people are moving to, and where they're coming from, to get a picture of the trends for each state. This year, like last year, Vermont won the highest percentage of inbound traffic. Vermont Business Magazine was happy to announce this, writing "Vermont is the only state to have achieved greater than a 70 percent in-bound rate, which it has done the last two years (74.3% in 2019 and 72.7% in 2018)." You can see on the map below that Americans mostly moved out of states with high taxation (California, NY, … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2020
How Early Markets Reacted to the U.S. Airstrike that Killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani
Yesterday, a U.S. airstrike killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, leader of the foreign wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. News of the strike and the general's death sent safe-haven asset prices higher as investors priced in greater risk in the Middle East. Assets such as gold and the 10-year U.S. Treasury note saw their prices rise as investor sentiment weakened. Gold was up 1.4% while the 10-year was at 1.827% Friday morning from 1.880% on Thursday (a drop in yield reflects an increase in price), while DJIA futures were down 226 pts pre-open. Is this a New Year’s prediction … [Read more...]
The Scary Japanese Preview for American Pension Funds
Japan's economy has been in trouble for a long time. Low, or no, growth for decades, and a demographic time-bomb that is about to go off, are two of the many problems Japan faces. Japan simply can't afford to pay its retirees what they'll need to survive, so the country's Financial Services Agency is recommending that retirees save more on their own. Akane Otani explains in The Wall Street Journal: Japan already is feeling the pinch: The national pension fund hasn’t grown rapidly enough to keep up with a rapid rise in the elderly population. As a result, the country’s Financial Services … [Read more...]
A Decade of Distortion: Implications for Retired and Soon-to-be Retired Investors
The 2010s were kind to U.S. stock market investors. There wasn’t a single bear market (down 20% from peak to trough) in the U.S. and stocks compounded at double-digit rates. The challenge for investors, as opposed to speculators, is that the gains were not driven entirely by improving fundamentals. The Big Driver of Stock Returns in the 2010s A convincing case can be made that the biggest driver of stock prices over the last decade was distortive monetary policy from the world’s biggest central banks. When the price of money is held at zero (negative in some countries) for nearly a … [Read more...]
Happy New Year!
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