From Berlin to Tokyo to Wellington, economic growth is slowing or turning negative across advanced economies, yet labor markets remain historically tight. Talk of a “jobful recession” has centered on the US, where payrolls grew by more than half a million in July and the unemployment rate declined to its prepandemic low of 3.5% even … Read more
Text size This commentary was issued recently by money managers, research firms, and market newsletter writers and has been edited by Barron’s. Is the Bond Market Right? Market Commentary Cresset CapitalAug. 3: Higher [bond] yields earlier this year drove equity prices lower, while the bond market’s recent optimism fueled the July rally. While the equity … Read more
Friday’s surprisingly strong jobs data sparked stock declines and a sharp rise in bond yields, with investors reassessing popular bets that the postpandemic economy won’t be defined by significantly higher interest rates than the one that preceded it. Yields, which rise when bond prices fall, surged after Friday’s report suggested the US economy isn’t cooling … Read more
LONDON (Project Syndicate)— Do you believe in fairy tales? If so, you could probably earn good money nowadays as a financial trader or gain power and prestige as a central banker. While annual inflation in the United States, the eurozone, and the United Kingdom has soared to 40-year highs and will probably hit double digits … Read more
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s optimistic comments about the US economy on Wednesday added to a debate among investors about whether stocks have reached a bear-market bottom. On the one hand, Thursday’s report on the health of the American economy, prompted an even more confusing discourse on where things actually stand when it comes to … Read more
Growth in the euro zone economy accelerated in the second quarter of the year, but the region’s prospects get hit as Russia continues to reduce gas supplies. The 19-member bloc registered a gross domestic product rate of 0.7% in the second quarter, according to Eurostat, Europe’s statistics office, beating expectations of 0.2% growth. It comes … Read more
“‘Ultimately, this will be a trap.’“ — Mike Wilson, chief US equity strategist and CIO, Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson, who correctly called the stock market’s 2022 swoon, isn’t convinced the lows are in after major US indexes scored a big gain following Wednesday’s Federal Reserve decision to raise rates by another 75 basis … Read more
The housing market is cooling off. After two years of red-hot sales, economic data paints a tale of a market that’s seeing weaker sales, plunging sentiment among homebuilders, and rising mortgage rates. But economists are divided over whether the US housing sector is in a recession. Some economists say it is. Given that the decline … Read more
The US economy shrank for a second quarter in a row—a common definition of recession—as businesses trimmed their inventories, the housing market buckled under rising interest rates, and high inflation took steam out of consumer spending. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, fell at an inflation … Read more
WASHINGTON—The Federal Reserve continued a sprint to reverse its easy-money policies by approving another unusually large interest rate increase and signaling more rises were likely coming to combat inflation that is running at a 40-year high. Officials agreed Wednesday to a 0.75-percentage-point rate rise, which will lift their benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between … Read more