A few years ago I wrote about the "everything" bubble because every investment asset class was in a price bubble. The most extreme example was bonds, which were trading at all-time low interest rates never before seen in human history -- negative interest rates in some cases, which meant lenders were paying borrowers to borrow money. The rate on ( Read more... )

I had a calm work day, then went to my massage, then came back to the house and cooked dinner for the two of us. Now I'm in bed, because I have to leave extra early tomorrow morning to drop off my car for its 30,000 mile service and then commute downtown ( Read more... )

Trump receives 52% of the major-party vote, and a bare majority of the popular vote ( Read more... )

Only five more business days as a supervisor, wow. I won't move offices immediately, we'll need to schedule a big office swap as I'm not the only person moving internally. Two non-supervisor managers are becoming supervisors of different workgrous, and one non-supervisor manager is moving to a different workgroup, just as I will move to a ( Read more... )

I grasped it the other day while walking with B to his favorite nearby restaurant, it's because of all these automatic paycheck deductions flowing into 401(k) index funds, it's because 50% of Americans believe in the "market" like they believe in "God", it's because history doesn't repeat reliably like an atomic clock does, we are forever out of ( Read more... )

President Joe Biden told an interviewer he considers himself a Zionist who has also done “more for the Palestinian community than anybody”

It is the nature of politicians to talk out of both sides of their mouths. Especially Democrats, who have a more diverse voter base than Republicans. Democrats feel they need to appeal to both Jews and ( Read more... )

I say this on the morning of the first Biden/Trump debate, and who knows how that will turn out. But a debate on a Thursday night in late June is unlikely to have much effect on voting in November ( Read more... )

It's not gonna be as bad as the 1918 flu pandemic. It won't be a zombie apocalypse. But it's probably going to be the worst pandemic of our lifetimes. And it will cause a recession -- so some businesses will go bankrupt, many people will lose their jobs ( Read more... )

If you average the monthly consumer price index during all of 2023, and compare this to the average during all of 2022, consumer inflation was 4.1% during 2023. That was the third highest annual price increase of the past 30 years, the most inflation except for 2022 (8.0%) and 2021 (4.7%). The price increases of the past three years were the ( Read more... )

If today were January 1, 2024, the S&P 500 stock price index would be starting the new year at its 8th priciest new-year level since 1872, as compared to the underlying long-term corporate earnings of the S&P 500. [We do have one more trading week left in 2023, so I may need to update this entry next weekend ( Read more... )