Market Indicators

While long-term interest rates have been trending higher driven by a combination of persistent inflation, Fed uncertainty and geopolitical conflict, earnings growth this year has been very strong. If the trend continues, earnings could continue to help equity markets outpace rising interest rate and inflation risks.

Stronger gold prices are happening for a couple different reasons. First of all, optimism is rising that the Strait of Hormuz may finally reopen soon. The news in Iran is certainly welcome, but new jobs data from ADP is helping gold, too.

There is no one-size-fits-all individual investment strategy. We all have different needs. Once I decided I needed a portfolio that would work for today, I became convinced that a dividend growth portfolio should be the core of my long-term investment strategy. Not an addition, but the core.

Two things are worth considering that will dramatically impact the stats moving forward, and neither of them existed as a factor a generation ago. Alternatives to a four-year degree are getting more government support too. Workforce Pell Grants, once reserved for traditional colleges, now extend to short-term job-training programs.

The S&P 500 was flat in July 2026 as semiconductors fell 29%, energy gained nearly 13% on higher oil, and long-term Treasury yields reached their highest levels since 2007.

Investors remain cautious despite bullish positioning, as rotations curb speculation while record margin debt and high equity allocations raise longer-term risks.

A clear-eyed view of past experience shows that where wealth taxes have been tried, they have usually been abandoned—and for good reason. As policymakers in California, New York, France, and elsewhere revisit this old idea, they should heed the lessons of this history.

In the span of a few weeks, a new college student takes on loan debt, gets their first credit card offer, and starts managing daily expenses on their own. They're buying groceries, splitting costs with roommates, saying yes to things they probably can't afford yet. No other period of life throws that many financial decisions at someone with that little experience.

By repeatedly describing standard inflation gauges as “imperfect measures of underlying inflation,” Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has pushed a long-running technical debate into the center of the policy conversation: What is the best way to measure underlying inflation?

When we talk about inflation, we usually focus on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). However, the Federal Reserve’s “preferred” inflation measure is the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) index. What’s the difference and why does the Fed prefer the PCE?

While the Fed left interest rates unchanged, Treasury yields moved notably higher throughout the week, with 30-year yields eclipsing their highest levels in nearly two decades as investors reassessed the outlook for inflation and monetary policy. The S&P 500 ended 1.06 percent higher to close a volatile week of trading, recovering from a mid-week sell-off.

July was an eventful month for both domestic and international markets, with US-Iran tensions flaring up, increasing energy prices and changing investor expectations for the Federal Reserve (Fed) cutting rates.

This summer has offered little opportunity for a lull. Investors have contended with Federal Reserve (Fed) policy uncertainty, renewed tariff-driven inflation concerns, escalating tensions in the Middle East, questions about the durability of AI-related investment spending and a packed earnings calendar.

The market spent much of this week trying to interpret what Fed Chair Kevin Warsh meant rather than what he actually said and that was entirely avoidable. The decision to leave rates unchanged was defensible. What wasn’t defensible was Warsh’s lack of explanation.

The latest earnings reports from Big Tech have laid bare a growing divide in the market's appetite for massive AI spending.

Kevin Warsh became Fed Chair barely ten weeks ago. He has presided over just two sets of monetary meetings and held two press conferences. Nonetheless, more than any chairman since at least Alan Greenspan, he has come under harsh criticism by the press right out of the gate.

In January 1790, the House of Representatives put a simple question to its new Treasury Secretary: what should America make for itself? Alexander Hamilton took almost two years to answer.

The US economy grew less than expected during the second quarter of the year, up 1.5% quarter over quarter, dragged down by strong growth in imports. However, final sales to private domestic purchasers increased by 3.9%, underscoring the strength in domestic demand, which continues to rely too heavily in AI investment spending and strong spending from high-income consumers, or what has been called the K economy.

Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

This week’s vote from the Federal Reserve FOMC committee is going to have implications for quite some time. I think most of the pundits who are writing about this have their analysis wrong. This was not just a vote to not raise rates. I think there was a lot more going on behind the scenes.

Forecasting is always fraught, but geopolitical turmoil makes it especially hazardous. Economic projections are only as reliable as the assumptions behind them, and those inputs can change quickly when conflicts are involved.

The Federal Reserve left its policy rate unchanged in July, with three participants dissenting in favor of a hike. Prior to the meeting, markets had priced roughly a one-third probability of a rate hike, so the hold was dovish relative to market pricing.

South Korea and Taiwan are grabbing the majority of financial news headlines when it comes to international exposure, but a peek inside Latin America reveals potential opportunities. Brazil, in particular, could be offering investors ample value in both equities and bonds beyond those aforementioned countries already benefiting from the artificial intelligence (AI) buildout.

A continued escalation in the Middle East, where the Iranian-backed Houthis joined the conflict in an attempt to disrupt Saudi Arabian crude shipments that pass through the Red Sea via the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, drove oil prices higher, while new tariff announcements and Alphabet's earnings release created headwinds for equities.

The US economy grew 2.0% in 2025 and it looks like it is growing another 2.0% this year. Real GDP grew at a 2.1% annual rate in the first quarter and, as we set out below, it looks like it grew at a 2.0% rate in the second quarter.

The market encountered its stiffest test in months last week as rising oil prices, higher bond yields, and renewed scrutiny of AI capital spending combined to pressure many of the year’s biggest winners. Easing tensions over the weekend have buoyed stocks. If the Strait of Hormuz was opened, I believe the market would be 5% to 10% higher.

With the US-Iran conflict nearing the five-month mark, equity markets have mostly shrugged off the latest escalation. On one hand, that’s understandable – a healthy economy and record corporate profits continue to support the market’s fundamentals. But a note of caution is warranted.

Chris Galipeau discusses high-conviction insights that go beyond media headlines.

For many years, globalization felt like a one-way street. Supply chains stretched effortlessly across continents. Companies built “just-in-time” systems that assumed goods, data, and capital would flow smoothly around the world. Investors could buy a global index fund and feel reasonably confident that they were capturing the benefits of ever-closer integration.

If you own treasuries, you need to make two separate decisions rather than one blended bet. The liquidity sleeve holds the bill exposure and does the work people mistakenly ask the long end to do. The duration sleeve stays deliberately small, sized as recession insurance rather than as a conviction call on falling inflation.

The structural backdrop for U.S. inflation increasingly suggests that the long run equilibrium range is migrating from roughly 1.5–3.5% toward 3.5–4.5%, with a significant risk of episodes of inflation above 5%. An important core reason is the steady erosion of the disinflationary architecture that dominated the 1990–2020 period, even as various cyclical pressures also play a role.

Brent crude crossed above $100 a barrel this week, all due to a 20-mile-wide stretch of water some 6,500 miles away from the U.S. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the Persian Gulf bottleneck that carried roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil before the fighting started—has fallen to virtually zero.

In this midyear global outlook summary, the authors revisit Vanguard’s economic and market outlooks and assess how our views have evolved since the start of the year.

Emerging markets are quietly having their best decade in a generation, and most global investors still don’t own enough. The case for investing in emerging markets today is not the tired characterisation of a high growth, low valuation opportunity.

Today we’ll consider the interaction between long-term interest rates, the Fed’s limited ability to influence them, inflation and the housing market. And because home prices are the biggest concern for many households, we’ll start with a look at the latest changes there. And then look at the Federal Reserve’s likely reaction.