Dear Friends: This blog post is a guest piece written by Mr. Steven Albrecht, President and CEO of Charter Trust Company, Concord, NH. I hope you enjoy his 2014 assessment of the financial markets. Mr. Albrecht can be reached at 603-224-1350, or via email at salbrecht@chartertrust.com. Best wishes, Ray Pinard ———————– Portfolio Review This is… Read More »
By Niall Ferguson, From the Wall Street Journal In the words of a veteran investor, watching the U.S. bond market today is like sitting in a packed theater and smelling smoke. You look around for signs of other nervous sniffers. But everyone else seems oblivious. Yes, the federal government shut down this week. Yes, we are… Read More »
National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) publisjed its September report on its web site. Chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) William C. Dunkelberg, issued the following statement on the September job numbers, based on NFIB’s monthly economic survey that will be released on Tuesday, October 8, 2013. The survey was conducted in September and… Read More »
The Heritage Foundation has published its August Labor Report The labor market remains one of the weakest aspects of the broadly mediocre economic recovery. Although the headline unemployment rate has gradually fallen to 7.3 percent, job creation has merely kept up with population growth, not regaining the ground it lost in the Great Recession. The… Read More »
CNBC published this interesting article by Senior Writer Jeff Cox on its web site. What’s good for central banks isn’t always good for the individuals they are supposed to serve, a lesson likely to come into view even more clearly in the days ahead. Higher inflation that’s to come will mean still-tough times for savers and… Read More »
An interesting article by J.R. Reed, published on the FreeEnterprise.com website. Thanks to increased U.S. exports and a significantly lower demand for oil imports, America’s trade deficit shrunk drastically in June – a trend that could signal great news for second quarter GDP numbers. The Department of Commerce recently announced that the trade gap fell more than… Read More »
Here’s an interesting article by Sean Hackbarth, published on the FreeEnterprise.com website: New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco indicates that economic policy uncertainty has made unemployment worse. Sylvain Leduc, vice president and Zheng Liu, research advisor in the Economic Research Department write: Our results suggests that, in late 2012, if there had been… Read More »
An interesting article from FreeEnterprise.com On the heels of President Obama’s speech on climate change, debate over the proclaimed “War on Coal” rages on in Washington. The latest to take a stand against the President’s proposed climate measures? Washington Postcolumnist Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer criticized the President for tackling an issue ranked only 21st in the Pew Research Center’s list of concerns most-important… Read More »
An interesting article from FreeEnterprise.com An Administration’s economic philosophies are sometimes crystal clear from the campaign. Others only become apparent in time. While some commentators are quick to pigeonhole this White House, in reality the Administration’s governing economic philosophy remains something of an enigma. For example, we know from past history that this White House… Read More »
Here’s a fascinating article by Sean Hackbarth that was published on FreeEnterprise.com: In the Washington Post, Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler, president and senior vice president respectively of the centrist think tank Third Way, pen and op-ed about the need for entitlement reform: There is a rising chorus on the left … that our fiscal conversation should be declared over… Read More »