While the sagging stock market is the result of many factors, corporate profits haven’t helped. In Q4, depending on how measured, corporate profits declined between 3.6% and 15%, and in 2015 they ranged from up 3.3% to down 5.1%. Using…
During Q1/16, the top performing asset was lean hogs, up a staggering 35.2%, followed by gold at 16.5%, utility stocks at 15.7%, and the Brazilian stock market, which rose 15.5%. The worst performer, rough rice, down 18.1%, followed by natural…
Friday’s jobs report showed a solid gain of 215,000 jobs. That said, the unemployment rate ticked up from 4.9% to 5% because the labor force grew by an even larger 396,000 persons! As a result, the labor force participation rate…
The Friday file: To raise revenue and end partisan bickering, a bill changing the name of the Liberty Bell to the Taco Liberty Bell and the Lincoln Memorial to the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial has surprisingly passed both houses of…
Between 1950 and 2000, half of electricity generated came from coal, now it’s just 32%, and the percentage coming from hydro has steadily fallen from 30% in 1950 to 6%. Conversely, natural gas, which was just 10% during the 1980s,…
While inventory of homes is low, commonly used measures such as months of inventory or number of units for sale, severely underestimate the shortage. The number of units for sale divided by the number of households has been flat at…
The unambiguous upside to quantitative easing is that in 2015, the Fed sent $97.8 billion in profits to the Treasury, surpassing last year’s record of $96.9 billion. These remittances have grown as the Fed’s portfolio of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities…
Large families benefit in Utah’s economy according to Dr. Eisenberg. Read more here.
Q4/15 GDP growth was recently revised up to 1.4%. The data continue to show an economy being driven primarily by consumer spending on services and secondarily by housing. It’s being held back by business investment, manufacturing, energy, bloated inventories and…
The Friday file: In the 1960s, 8.8% of songs in the Billboard Hot 100 had a one word title. That jumped to 9.7% in the 70s, 11.1% in the 80s, 13.2% in the 90s, 19.9% in the 00s and 23.2%…