Deep Dive

DEEP DIVE: The Worry List

Jul 8, 2023 4 min read paid

Economists who are still forecasting a recession typically offer four reasons. First is the inversion of the yield curve. Second is the drop in M2. Third is the significant tightening of monetary policy resulting from the increase in the federal funds rate combined with quantitative tightening (QT). Fourth is that consumers’ excess saving accumulated during the pandemic could run out as soon as September. A more immediate risk to the

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Baby Boomers Retiring With $75 Trillion In Net Worth

Jun 28, 2023 4 min read paid

When the Fed started to raise interest rates aggressively last year, there was lots of speculation that it would cause a recession. Housing certainly fell into a recession as housing starts plunged 25.7% from a peak of 1.80 million units (saar) during April 2022 to a trough of 1.34 million units during January and April 2023 (Fig. 1). Consumer spending adjusted for inflation has been on a

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: All About S&P 500 Earnings

Jun 17, 2023 4 min read paid

Earnings I: The Past The Q1 earnings season is over, and the final numbers are in. They were better-than-expected results, which isn’t surprising when the economy is growing. Worse-than-expected results tend to occur when the economy is falling into a recession. That the economy would fall into a recession has been a widespread concern—but not our outlook, as you know. So far, so good. Today, let’s review

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Stocks Discounting Earnings Recovery

May 25, 2023 3 min read paid

The stock market discounts earnings over the next 52 weeks. How do we know this? Most industry analysts provide earnings estimates for the current year and the coming year. They might provide earnings estimates or earnings growth forecasts beyond that period, but investors aren’t likely to have as much confidence in earnings forecasts beyond the next 52 weeks. Of course, industry analysts don’t forecast earnings on a 52-week-ahead

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Bad & Good Breadth

May 18, 2023 2 min read paid

Joe and I have recently observed that the S&P 500 has a breadth problem. This is a widely recognized problem by most technicians who track the stock market. The good news is that a more fundamental measure of earnings breadth is performing well. Consider the following: (1) If we are in a bull market that started on October 12, 2022 as we still believe, our thesis isn’t

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Fiscal Policy - A Trillion Here, a Trillion There

May 1, 2023 3 min read paid

We have been on Wall Street as economists and strategists for more than 40 years. Over that entire period, doomsters have been scribbling away, producing lots of articles and books about the US federal deficits and debt. The only pause in their doom and gloom was during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the federal government ran a surplus for a brief time. Nevertheless, while the annual federal deficits

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Artificial Intelligence - Everything Everywhere All At Once

Mar 24, 2023 4 min read paid

The announcements have come fast and furiously. Anyone who has anything to do with AI is broadcasting it to the world loudly. Chip manufacturers, software providers, social media companies, and the average Joe all are talking about how they’re harnessing the power of AI to work faster and smarter. This week’s news has been dominated by Nvidia’s impressive AI offerings unveiled at its software developer conference and

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: A Baby-Boom Theory of the Tight Labor Market

Mar 14, 2023 2 min read paid

The persistently strong demand for labor has surprised everyone from soft landers to hard landers. Fed officials are flummoxed. They’ve raised the federal fund rate by almost 500bps since early last year to cool labor demand and wage inflation. Yet the labor market remains hot. During January, the demand for workers measured as the sum of employment and job openings totaled 171.0 million, 5.1 million more than

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: S&P 500 Earnings Season's Greetings

Mar 9, 2023 2 min read paid

The Q4-2022 earnings season is over. Joe reports that S&P 500 earnings data are out for the quarter. We weren’t surprised by the top-line or bottom-line numbers. That’s because we follow the weekly data series on forward revenues, forward earnings, and the forward profit margin. They continue to steer us in the right direction for assessing the near-term outlook for the comparable quarterly data (Fig. 1)

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: US Economy - Soft, Hard, Or No Landing?

Feb 25, 2023 4 min read paid

We think we coined “rolling recession” back in the mid-1980s to describe the economic slowdown that many feared would turn into an economy-wide recession. We think the phrase accurately describes the performance of the US economy since early last year. It’s similar to a “growth recession,” “mid-cycle slowdown,” and “soft landing” but includes the concept that different areas of the economy are experiencing the slowdowns at different times. We

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: The Fed Is Fighting the Markets

Feb 18, 2023 3 min read paid

Fed officials have indicated that they’d rather see stock and bond prices fall than continue to rise, as they’ve been doing since October of last year. In their opinion, financial markets’ strength has eased financial conditions in the economy, offsetting some of their efforts to tighten financial conditions to bring inflation down. Joe and I question their logic. In our opinion, the drop in bond yields since late

Ed Yardeni

DEEP DIVE: Who Will Win the AI Search Arms Race?

Feb 9, 2023 4 min read paid

This week, both Microsoft and Google made announcements touting their artificial intelligence (AI) prowess and plans as they battle to dominate the nascent AI niche, which some believe will be as important as the iPhone or cloud computing. Of course, they’re not alone. Venture capitalists poured money into the more than 75 startups, by some counts, that aspire to conquer the hot area. Let’s look at what some

Ed Yardeni

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