At the last Fed press conference, Jay Powell basically took Goldilocks out back and shot her. Everyone should have a plan for the if and the when, and make sure you can live with what your portfolio looks like if we hit a pothole later this year or in 2024.

Ethics in Finance Matter. Aligning ethics, morality, and self-interest in finance is crucial because that’s how you get real change and real alternatives for the benefit of clients.

The Fed is tightening, mortgage rates are at 20-year highs, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to get the loan. And then, there is the renewed realization that “it’s not easy being green," as Argentinians can attest and Crypto fans refuse to accept.

Educated students of the economy and markets were preparing for a recession and a decline in corporate earnings in 2023. At the risk of mis-quoting former public servant George Tenet, the “slam-dunk call” was for tough markets and a tough economy in 2023. Then around the end of 2022, the stock market started climbing and it just kept going…

For over a decade, earning interest on relatively low-risk securities, like US Treasury bills and bonds, has been elusive. This has caused investors to do all sorts of scary things like “chasing yield.” But now, after a year of relentless interest-rate hikes, investors can earn over 5% on T-bills. Cash is no longer trash and there is honest interest on tap for anyone willing to invest in a portfolio of relatively low-risk securities.

Blackrock is launching a private credit offering for retail investors. Is private credit asset management’s new “Muppets” show? I hope not, but there is a bit of yuck in the air, especially if you’re a student of incentives in “product innovation” in the asset management industry. As Bloomberg put it, this is a “tricky time” for private credit. Let me explain.

Interest rates will stay up as long as the economy is strong, was Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s basic message. The part of the sentence that goes unspoken is that interest rates can be expected to come down if the economy goes bust (and we’ll know that’s happening when jobs are lost, the stock market drops, and so on and so forth). And as interest rates decline, the value of bonds will rise. That windfall is the hedging component of bonds’ returns.

Now that the US debt ceiling crisis, which was both serious and silly, has joined Y2K as the latest disaster that never actually happened, the US Treasury, led by Janet Yellen, is focused on replenishing its bank account. This account is called the Treasury General Account (TGA), held at the Federal Reserve.