George Hosfield, CFA, discusses Ferguson Wellman's quarterly strategy titled, "Inflation's Flame Flickers," which addresses the narrow market leadership, the impact of higher interest rates on inflation and how assets are priced at this stage of the economic cycle.
George Hosfield, CFA, discusses the firm's quarterly strategy titled "Stalemate," which highlights the Fed's ongoing battle to tame inflation along with our views on the health of the banking industry and capital market expectations for the balance of the year.
Director and Chief Investment Officer George Hosfield, CFA, discusses the Fed raising interest rates, peaking inflation and our view on equities and volatility across all asset classes in our Investment Strategy titled, “Balancing Act.”
It’s the tail-end of the first quarter of 2019 earnings reporting season and the results have been better than expected. While corporate earnings growth was up 22 percent in 2018 due in part to tax cuts, this year those same cuts will provide limited benefits and corporate earnings growth is expected to only be up around 5 percent for the full-year 2019.
Bonds are, at their core, less complex and more easily understood than most clients might assume. While “interest rates” and “bond yields” make them sound complicated, bonds can be boiled down quite simply: bonds are loans.
As we look back on 2018, we can summarize the year as one where volatility emerged at the same time equity markets and the economy diverged enormously. In fact, 2018 is estimated to produce the strongest economic growth since the Global Financial Crisis at 3.0 percent.
With a week subdued by a day of mourning, traders hoped market volatility would follow suit: it did not. In less than three trading sessions the S&P 500 traded down five percent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 1,400 points and small cap stocks lost 6 percent.
As the U.S. expansion draws closer to becoming the longest on record, a number of economic and political risks have emerged or intensified in recent months, leading to global equity market weakness.
It was a busy week in Washington with a highly anticipated midterm election followed by the Federal Reserve meeting. The results of both came in as expected although it seems the markets were not synced to that result.
