When the Federal Reserve (Fed) cut rates in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mortgage rates fell below 3% in 2021 and many households refinanced or obtained new loans.
The Biden administration is nearly finished divvying up $39 billion in grants under the Chips and Science Act, the landmark bipartisan legislation aimed at revitalizing the domestic semiconductor industry. The bigger test still lies ahead.
Warren Buffett’s sudden sale of a huge pile of Apple Inc. shares has come with a surprise silver lining for investors in the iPhone maker: Its influence in major stock indexes is set to be fully unleashed.
The growth of bureaucracy around the world has led to a proliferation of rules. This creates multitudes of problems, one of which is that the state has made understanding what it is doing impenetrable, boring, nuanced, and technical.
Treasury yields plunged below 4% this week for the first time since January on recession fears as global manufacturing activity contracted and hiring in the U.S. slowed dramatically in July.
Global investors are gobbling up bonds that can be turned into stocks, feeling good about the prospects and return potentials of smaller companies.
President Joe Biden’s withdrawal and endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris has sent shockwaves through the political establishment, and while former President Donald Trump remains the frontrunner, the wind has certainly shifted in Harris’s favor.
The bitcoin halving event in April 2024 reduced the block reward for miners, which is expected to increase bitcoin’s price.
US initial public offerings should get a boost this week from as much as $5.5 billion in first-time equity issuance that could be the opening investors have been clamoring for during this latest new listings slump.
While it's too early to declare small caps' recent outperformance as a meaningful trend shift, we continue to think high-quality companies and industries will likely perform well.
One was in the car with her family, the other had his phone off, when Jamie Dimon began dialing their numbers on a Saturday in January with a question: Could they run a Wall Street operation bigger than Goldman Sachs?
Fed speakers will deny any notion that its monetary policy aims in part to help the government fund her debts. Regardless of what they say, we are already in an age of fiscal dominance. Monetary policy must consider the nation’s debt situation.
Rachel Reeves is going to need some money. The UK’s new Chancellor of the Exchequer has inherited, she says, one of the worst sets of circumstances since World War II.
Some previously high-flying chip stocks have retreated much more than 5% since the start of the third quarter.
For more than two years, inflation has eclipsed everything else at the Federal Reserve. In a shift eagerly awaited by global markets, that’s poised to change.
The barbarians are back at the gates. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are confident that their most important clients are about to get active after a long spell on the sidelines and help goose the long-awaited revival in investment banking fees.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. joined rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. in the tapping the US investment-grade market after reporting second-quarter earnings.
Softening inflation supports the potential for a Federal Reserve interest rate cut in coming months, but there are complexities below the surface.
We are in the time of year when Americans pack transatlantic airliners for their European vacations. I had actually hoped to be one of them. That didn’t work out but we can still talk about events in Europe. And we probably should, because potentially major changes are happening.
Comparing public fixed income and private credit markets involves weighing factors related to liquidity, transparency, credit quality, risk premium, and opportunity costs.
As Pete Stavros addressed the private equity industry’s yearly shindig in Berlin last month, the KKR & Co. executive’s words were slightly less headline grabbing than those of Apollo Global Management’s co-president Scott Kleinman. But they were just as troubling.
Life has been getting busier for investment bankers, but dealmakers aren’t cashing any checks yet. A stream of big-ticket merger and acquisition announcements this year bodes well for future revenue and bonuses, but no one gets paid until deals are completed. And that might not happen until late 2024 or even next year.
Struggling under the weight of interest rates, highly-levered assets within private equity and real estate are promising distressed investors some of the best opportunities in more than a decade, according to Howard Marks, co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management.
The labor market continues to normalize and soften, but we think any further weakening might push the Fed to cut rates before the 2% inflation target is reached.
Jerome Powell will face pressure this week from lawmakers growing impatient for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and others who are unhappy with its latest plan to boost capital requirements for Wall Street lenders.
Worried that inflation is coming down too gradually? The Romans had a not-so-subtle solution: Anyone suspected of ratcheting up prices faced execution. If you’re currently anxious about declining fertility across today’s major economies, they had an answer for that, too: Celibacy was discouraged among women, Vestal Virgins excluded. Offenders might forfeit their inheritance.
My financial education didn’t have the most auspicious start. I suppose I was lucky that in high school I had a class on basic investing and finance.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the latest economic data suggest inflation is getting back on a downward path, but added officials would like to see more evidence before lowering interest rates.
The giant federal debt we’ve been talking about isn’t just borrowed money. It is also lent money. Loans are two-party transactions. One side receives temporary use of cash which it agrees to repay with interest. The other gives up the current use of that cash in exchange for receiving interest. Ideally, it works out for both… but not always.
This week I had the privilege of participating in a YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) event held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. One of the main topics of discussion was investment opportunities in neighboring Zambia, a country that, despite its challenges, is a rising star on the African continent, due largely to its copper exports.
Sour sentiment toward emerging-market stocks is obscuring uncommon opportunities for equity investors.
The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying US inflation decelerated in May, bolstering the case for lower interest rates later this year.
Investors need a better grasp of risk-management tools to gauge a portfolio’s strategic resilience in a rapidly changing world.
Much like the universe, which began with a big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, but is expanding so rapidly that scientists predict it will all end in a “big freeze” trillions of years from now, our current monetary system seems to require perpetual expansion to maintain its existence.
Norinchukin Bank is best known outside of Japan as an investing whale in the market for bonds that package up loans to private equity businesses, known as collateralized loan obligations.
This year's tale of two markets has underscored resilience at the index level but considerable weakness at the individual member level, leading to massive performance divergences.
In his mid-year outlook, Jim Cielinski, Global Head of Fixed Income, recognizes markets were impatient in wanting rate cuts, but the offset is fresh opportunities for investors to capture attractive yields.
Private credit investors in Europe are abandoning leveraged plays to try to get ahead of a potential wave of defaults.
This summer, countless bankers and financiers will get away to the Hamptons or vacation in Europe. And a handful will be traveling nearly every weekend — to play lacrosse.
Dell Technologies Inc. shares rose on Thursday after Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said the company is building a “Dell AI factory” for Elon Musk’s startup xAI alongside Nvidia Corp.
After being on the frontline of the pandemic, then grappling with an edgy public and a spike in shoplifting, its been a tough few years to work retail. But for Walmart Inc. managers, at least, things are looking up.
Nadeem Meghji was on honeymoon in late 2022 when the biggest storm to have rocked Blackstone Inc.’s property business hit its peak.
Recently, James Grant, editor of the Interest Rate Observer, was asked about his outlook for interest rates. He sees interest rates moving in a cyclical pattern, potentially rising for another multi-decade period.
More than a few individuals were active in the markets in 1999-2000, but many participants today were not. I remember looking at charts and writing about the craziness in markets as the fears of “Y2K” and the boom of “internet” filled media headlines.
This week, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) significantly upgraded its profitability projections for airlines in 2024. The trade group now expects net profits to reach $30.5 billion, an increase from $27.4 billion in 2023.
You know I’m highly concerned about government debt in the developed world, particularly the US. I’ve said for years a crisis is coming. We’ve blown right past all our chances to avoid it. Now all we can do is imagine what the crisis will look like… and how much it will hurt.
Certain segments of the economy and stock market have experienced much stronger recoveries this year, underscoring a severe bifurcation between the "haves" and "have nots."
When JPMorgan Chase & Co. arranged a series of trades to shift the risk of losses from $20 billion of its loans, some of those dangers wound up at a familiar place: rival banks.
Whether it’s another move up or a dive down, traders are bracing for added volatility wrought by Wednesday’s dual macroeconomic catalysts: a report on consumer prices in the morning and the Federal Reserve’s rate decision in the afternoon.
A broad equity rally isn’t spilling over into the technology sector, where gains are still concentrated in just a few artificial intelligence winners that have become defensive plays amid an uncertain macroeconomic backdrop.
