The Federal Reserve’s asset purchase program, known as quantitative easing, has twice helped save the US economy — first during the financial crisis and then again with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Federal Reserve is likely to cut policy rates this year less than the market expects, and the latest inflation report shows why.

Dueling economic reports whiplashed bond markets on Friday — for all the wrong reasons.

Ever since the world was hit by a once-in-a-century pandemic, there’s been a lot of talk about “normalization.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell faces a communications conundrum at the central bank’s policy meeting this week. Luckily for him, he could just let the Summary of Economic Projections do most of the talking — and avoid unnecessary misunderstandings.

On Wall Street and in the financial media, many of us make our living by attempting to say “smart stuff” about the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately in some cases, that creates an incentive to make central banking out to be more complicated than it is.

Among his many contributions, Munger was a prolific armchair philosopher, whose speeches and interviews included hundreds — maybe thousands — of nuggets about how to invest and live well.

The deflationistas have been working themselves into a tizzy since Walmart Inc. Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon warned of a period of declining prices at the big-box retailer in the months to come.

For the past decade, South Florida’s politicians and development officials have fanned dreams — which long felt like delusions — of the region reinventing itself as some sort of “Wall Street South.”

On Wall Street, there’s always a lot of excitement around the latest inflation report. Tuesday’s better-than-expected number was an extreme example — bond yields plummeted and stocks surged.

The bond market giveth and the bond market taketh away. The S&P 500 Index closed in the red Thursday, blowing its widely-hyped chance at a nine-day winning streak, which would have been its best run since 2004.

Everything in the world is relative, including Warren Buffett’s cash position.

Billionaire Stan Druckenmiller isn’t letting up on his criticism of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Druckenmiller says Yellen committed an epic mistake by failing to meaningfully term out America’s debt when rates were ultra-low — a missed opportunity he’s characterized as “the biggest blunder in the history of the Treasury.”

Yields on 10-year Treasury notes plummeted 20 basis points on Wednesday, the most since the banking crisis in March. For all the macroeconomic news of the day, it was hard to pinpoint exactly what changed so meaningfully from one trading session to the next.

Small businesses account for close to half of US private sector employment, so there’s always considerable focus on their prospects, especially during periods of rising interest rates and contracting credit.

Before we get carried away anew with declarations about how “the investing world is forever changing,” it’s worth remembering how fluid the relationship has proved over the past couple of years — and how another twist is always just around the corner.

Howard Marks, the legendary credit investor and Oaktree Capital Management co-founder, has historically taken a humble approach to investing: the macro future is essentially unknowable, so active investors should focus on the small-picture things where they can gain an informational advantage.

What everyone wants to know now is how much further the selloff will go and how long it will last. I can venture a few educated guesses based on history.

South Florida has a reputation as a leading indicator of housing market trouble, so the Cassandras are understandably watching the region closely these days.

The Federal Reserve’s hawks have been back on the speaking circuit,and markets are abuzz that rates may have to move higher than previously expected. Someone apparently just took out a big short position premised on the chances that rates markets underestimate the odds of an increase in November.

Since 2012, Puerto Rico has offered investors — primarily mainland Americans — one of the most attractive deals in the world: move to the commonwealth and pay no taxes on interest, dividends or capital gains, all while living on a balmy and culturally vibrant Caribbean island without having to surrender US citizenship.

The US may be heading back into a “vibecession” — a condition in which consumer confidence and other economic “vibes” decline so much that they threaten to become self-fulfilling prophecies and drag the economy down with them.

Some seven weeks ago, hedge fund investor Bill Ackman laid out his rationale for shorting long-term US bonds, and I took exception.

The Federal Reserve’s internal debate about the “neutral” real rate of interest is heating up.

These days, high-yield US bonds yield just 378 basis points over Treasuries, more than 2 percentage points below the 2022 high and close to the narrowest gap since the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates last year.

Reported inflation has been improving for months, but Federal Reserve policymakers are still understandably worried that it’s a head fake — perhaps none more than Governor Christopher Waller, who has repeatedly referenced the risk of being hoodwinked by the data.

The US market for initial public offerings is finally reopening after the sleepiest stretch in 32 years. Grocery delivery business Instacart, data automation provider Klaviyo and semiconductor designer Arm Holdings Ltd. all filed to go public last week.

Central bankers generally believe in an abstract phenomenon known as the neutral real rate of interest, or r-star. It’s the inflation-adjusted rate that should prevail when the economy is balanced with price increases subdued and the labor market healthy.

Yields on 10-year Treasury notes have spent 18 sessions trading above 4% this year, but some doomsayers are ready to declare a permanent shift to a higher-yield regime. They attribute it to factors such as demographics, the looming clean-energy transition and large government deficits. And sure, that could be.

Admittedly, I’ve glossed over the other catalysts in Ackman’s thesis — including the aforementioned supply-demand issues and the fiscal and governance challenges that Fitch underscored in its recent downgrade — but the inflation call seems to be the linchpin to his argument, at least going by the math in the post.

All told it’s hard to get worked up about the near-term implications of the latest downgrade. But it’s telling that one of the most popular defenses of America’s creditworthiness has lost its rhetorical potency.

The only constant in life is change — and Wall Street strategists trying in vain to divine the stock market’s future. After collectively missing the lion’s share of the year-to-date rally in the S&P 500 Index, the Street’s macro soothsayers appear to be getting modestly more bullish again.

The US economy expanded at a 2.4% annual pace in the second quarter, crushing consensus expectations and driving another stake into the 2023 recession narrative.

Howard Marks’ classic investing book The Most Important Thing has more nuggets of wisdom than I can count, but my personal favorites are his reflections on the futility of forecasting.

Last December, Florida’s legislature passed a controversial but necessary set of reforms aimed at shoring up the state’s teetering property insurance market, where a string of insurers had canceled policies and even filed for bankruptcy, leaving homeowners with dwindling options.

After a stretch of wildly positive economic surprises, the latest US retail sales data felt like more of a mixed bag: the top-line number missed forecasts and, partially in response, stocks drifted aimlessly between losses and modest gains.

Maybe it’s something about the dog days of summer — the record heat in the last few weeks has made everyone a little delirious — but the July-August period is proving particularly popular for “pivot” rallies in US financial markets.

Everyone can stop all the hand-wringing over the “over-concentration” of the Nasdaq 100: The index provider is doing something about it, as expected, in a sign that the system is working as intended after all.

The cognoscenti may have been too quick to declare the end of the Great Resignation.

Markets are inherently forward-looking, but they’re not clairvoyant. Securities prices tend to reflect some well-founded assumptions about the immediate future and then a whole bunch of wild guesswork about the medium to long term.

There’s a mantra in markets that you’re not supposed to “fight” the Federal Reserve. Policymakers fight inflation by tightening “financial conditions,” and broad market rallies tend to work against that objective.

The US economy keeps surprising the doomsayers, and Tuesday’s data is just latest the example.

In life as in markets, there will always be macro folks and micro folks, each tending to believe that their approach is better than the other.

The US core consumer price index — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — rose 0.4% in May from a month earlier, extending its streak of moderately bad inflation readings of roughly that size to six. On a three-month annualized basis, core CPI has been around 5% since November.

Disagreement is bubbling up at the Federal Reserve as dueling growth and inflation risks pull policymakers in different directions. If you think the debate seems fiery now, just wait until the third quarter, when recession may be at the nation’s doorstep.

The US office market faces a tough road ahead. Corporate tenants are considering scaling back, higher interest rates are hurting valuations and many property owners face looming debt maturities that they may struggle to refinance.

A year into its fight against inflation, the Federal Reserve could — just maybe — be done raising its policy rate. History shows that monetary policy pauses mark great buying opportunities for US stocks, but there are several key caveats to bear in mind this time.

There’s a price to be paid for being early in investing even if you get the broader story right, as US stock market bears are learning the hard way.

Investors, economists and journalists have been talking incessantly about recession for the better part of the past year, and they’re all tired of it.

A bad earnings season just might be good for stocks.