The market confronted the news about the potential for restrictions on big tech companies with a negative attitude. Cooler heads have started to prevail already. In the late 19th and early 20th century, businessman John D. Rockefeller gained almost total control of the oil business. At its height, the trust that controlled all of Rockefeller’s […]

After a terrible May for U.S. stock markets, with investor confidence continuing to decline, any good news is welcomed, even the subtle hints made on Tuesday by Jerome Powell. With economic growth shrinking, and the trade war with China not only raging on but doing so even more intensely, along with new tariffs announced on […]

When stock markets decline, they tend to carry most stocks in tow. Exchange stocks can behave a little differently, and can be an attractive option when the market is declining. Regardless of what investing strategy we use, and what we choose to invest in, managing the risk of our investments plays a significant role in […]

Stocks and bonds often move in opposite directions, especially when confidence in the stock market wanes. Given the correlation, does this mean that stocks are in trouble? We want to be careful drawing assumptions about causation from evidence of things being correlated, and messing this up is one of the most common fallacies that we […]

Not all that long ago, people used to go to their bank to get their mortgage. This was a very relationship driven business. The internet came along and changed everything. Banks used to handle just about all of the mortgage business at one time, and all of it among those whose credit risk fit the […]

President Trump escalating the trade war with China has weighed pretty heavily upon U.S. stock markets during the first two days of this week. How big of a deal is this? Donald Trump’s engagement in the ongoing trade war with China took an abrupt turn for the worse on Sunday, with the president tweeting that […]

Investors often worry about risk, but many don’t think about it too much unless they have already been exposed to a lot of it. We always want to be aware of such things. A very popular approach to risk management among individual investors is to just choose to ignore it, and even approach this ignorance […]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was put in place in 2008 in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis. New director Kathy Kraninger is focused more on education than enforcement. The financial crisis of 2007 exposed many cracks in the system, and once we started to right the ship a little, the Obama administration created a […]

While some observers have been recommending going long gold recently, the play was really dependent on its not breaking support. It has, and is now at a crossroads. Gold tends to do pretty well when the economy is slowing down, and this has prompted some analysts to recommend taking long positions in gold, to look […]

Democrats and Republicans traditionally disagree on matters of taxation, with Republicans preferring less of it and Democrats more. This divide may be bigger than ever now. One of the governing principles of modern governments is that those who earn more must pay more, not just in terms of nominal amounts but also pay a higher […]