Robert Burgess

Bond Traders Are as Confused as Anyone These Days

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,…

The Latest Currency War May Just Be a Skirmish

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…

Sorry Savers, Banks Don’t Want Your Money

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…

Surging Inflation Puts the Fed in an Impossible Situation

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…

Stock Bulls Take An Unlikely Shine to Europe

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…

The Stock Market Bandwagon Is Filling Up Quickly

The US stock market as measured by the MSCI USA Index just posted its best two-day performance since February, rising 1.58 percent Tuesday and 1.13 percent Wednesday. What’s notable is that the gains, in the wake of a nasty sell-off that left equities on the cusp of a correction, aren’t coming with…

Global Equities Confront Uncomfortable Truth

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…

Markets Have No Use for Economists These Days

Investors in the US awakened Thursday to a slew of reports from economists upgrading their second-quarter growth forecasts. The new estimates from the likes of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC ranged from 2.75 percent to 4.2 percent. And yet the S&P 500 Index fell and…