Tag Archives: US economy

Why are equities, gold, and the dollar surging?

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July 30, 2024 — The US stock market is on a tear.  Since the start of this year, January 2024, the Dow Jones , S&P 500, and NASDAQ have each repeatedly set new all-time records.  Indeed, the trend in stocks has been strongly upward for the last two or three years.   For instance, the S & P 500 is about 40 % above where it was  in January 2021, when Joe Biden became President [43 % higher].

The price of gold has also shown a strong upward trend, reaching $2,470 an ounce on July 17, the highest in history.  Why are these assets so elevated? read more

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Is the US Economy Really About to Go Boom?

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Politico asked 8 of us for a prognosis on US growth in the new year. This was my response —

Something important will get better in 2014: Fiscal policy will stop hurting the economy. The results should show up as expansion in such service sectors as health, education and construction.

The biggest impediment to economic expansion over the last three years has been destructive budget policy coming out of the Congress: misguided fiscal drag in the short term (crude cuts in spending, especially under the sequester; the expiration a year ago of Obama’s payroll tax holiday); repeated unnecessary disruptive and uncertainty-maximizing political crises (debt ceiling showdowns and government shutdown); and little progress on the genuine longer-term fiscal problem, which is the 40-year prognosis for U.S. debt (a result of projected rapid growth in entitlement spending). These fiscal failures have together probably subtracted well over a percentage point from U.S. growth in each of the last three years. read more

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