Robert Burgess

In times of economic uncertainty, it used to pay to check with the bond market to see what signals it was sending. Is the economy headed into a recession? See whether yields are declining. Is inflation about to accelerate? See whether yields are rising. Bonds were the economy’s crystal ball. Now,…

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in the foreign-exchange market about a fresh “currency war” breaking out, with countries and central banks taking action to support their weakening currencies to offset a strengthening US dollar. The last currency war took place a decade ago, but that one was about…

Savers are about to learn one painful and one surprising lesson about interest rates and banks. First, just because the Federal Reserve is raising rates doesn’t mean the rate investors earn on their cash will rise as much — if at all. In fact, the financial repression in the form of zero rates…

There were no encouraging signs in the Labor Department’s report Thursday that showed the consumer price index surged a greater-than-forecast 7.5% in January from a year earlier, marking a fresh four-decade high. The gains were broad and deep, suggesting that inflation is becoming entrenched and…

The Europe index has outperformed the global market since the end of January, gaining 5.53 percent to the MSCI’s 2.86 percent increase. The cynics would say this is solely due to the European Central Bank’s dovish turn, but that only happened last week. The outperformance of European stocks has…

A strong performance in July allowed the MSCI All-Country World Index of stocks to end a month in the black for the year for the first time since January, gaining 1.7 percent. Strip out U.S. equities, though, and the benchmark is still showing a loss of 3.39 percent for 2018. Therein lies a big…