Posts by Daniel Keever

  A mere three weeks ago we were confronting a run on Silicon Valley Bank followed by a bank bailout orchestrated by the FDIC, the US Treasury, and the Fed. The official response was swift and robust. The Fed opened the discount window, member banks took advantage of the liquidity, banks across the country took…

March 20th, 2023 What is a Treasury yield curve and why does it matter? There’s been a lot of attention from economic pundits and the financial press on the so-called “yield curve inversion” as an indicator of impending recession. Many people don’t know what the yield curve is and why inversion matters. The picture is…

News headlines about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) are everywhere. At this stage, speculation is rampant as to whether this will be an isolated event or whether other banks will experience similar challenges. Moreover, it is unclear whether this will lead to fallout in other industries for SVB’s depositors. The uncertainty is high…

The economy in the broadest sense is a complex system of multiple inputs, outputs, and interactions between millions of variables and independent agents. As such, it can be a difficult thing to grasp, let alone predict. Nonetheless, economists and professional investors attempt to make predictions about the direction and magnitude of various aspects of the…

Last week we had two inflation prints: one for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and one for the Producer Price Index (PPI). While the headline grabber was that the monthly prints were above expectations (and they were) the Fed is nonetheless making considerable progress in its inflation fight as evidenced by both the CPI and…

February 13th, 2023 Markets were down last week, taking a break from a run that has been strong so far this year. Investors are somewhat baffled by the market’s rise this year, given the economic and corporate earnings backdrop. It seems to many that the market’s trajectory is totally divorced from economic reality. Many wonder,…

The rally in stocks so far this year has been impressive. Here are the year-to-date returns for broad market averages through February 3, 2023: Nasdaq Index 14.77%, S&P 500 Index 7.86%, and Dow Jones Industrial average 5.40%. The hotly debated question is: at what level “should” stocks be trading given the Fed’s ongoing inflation battle,…