The U.S. government has officially entered into “fiscal madness” (from First Trust Economics Blog on September 5)…

Back in the 1980s, President Reagan took enormous political heat (Sam Donaldson comes to mind) for being fiscally irresponsible. His offense? Presiding over a budget deficit that peaked at 5.9% of GDP in Fiscal Year 1983. But at least Reagan had an excuse.  Actually, multiple excuses. The unemployment rate averaged 10.1% in FY 1983, which
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Walmart’s recent pay cuts suggest the jobs market is softening (from The Wall Street Journal on September 7)…

Walmart is paying some new store workers less than it would have three months ago, a sign that employers are seeking to cut labor costs as the once-hot market for hourly staff cools.   The country’s largest private employer changed its wage structure for hourly workers in mid-July, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street
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An update on the correlation between stocks and bonds (from Verdad Weekly Research on September 11)…

Investors tend to think of stocks and bonds as negatively correlated, with stocks doing well in positive growth environments and bonds doing well when growth slows or declines. And that was largely true for the last quarter century. But earlier this year, the trailing three-year correlation between stocks and bonds turned positive for the first
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The record spread between 30-year mortgage rates and the 30-year U.S. Treasury yield could be a bearish signal for stocks (from C. Scott Garliss via X on September 11)…

Keep an eye on the spread between 30-year mortgage rates and the 30-year U.S. Treasury yield. Since 1990, it has only been this high three other times… 2Q 2000, 4Q 2008. and 1Q 2020. Each of those marked a major inflection point for the S&P 500 Index…

Today’s near-record high market valuations suggest that stocks could suffer dramatic losses if inflation remains sticky (from Bloomberg on September 11)…

In straightforward absolute terms, without comparing to bond yields, equity valuations are again getting hard to ignore. In the 12 months to the end of August, the S&P 500 managed a price return of 14%. Of that, increasing price/earnings multiples accounted for 12.4 percentage points, according to a decomposition by Patrick Palfrey of Credit Suisse
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