This being a four-day workweek for some, the morning ritual struck me as a useful UrbanSurvival topic. The reason for the short workweek is Good Friday which, if you don’t mind my saying so, is an oxymoron.  ALL Friday’s are good although when the day was pegged way back when, I doubt the inter-denominational marketing … Read More

A couple of big items on the agenda this morning.  In the ChartPack section we work through what some of the initial Syria results are in terms of market impacts. Then, in the Focus piece, we consider how homes and car prices might fare in the opening couple of years of a Second Depression when … Read More

First thing out of the hopper is the Employment Situation report just issued by the Labor Department: “The unemployment rate declined to 4.5 percent in March, and total nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 98,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services and in mining, while retail … Read More

We have been noticing a story making the rounds about “Old-fashioned rest stops disappearing in some states…” Although it appears in many newspapers, we tracked it back to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ website here. Since Elaine and I semi-regularly head out on 5,000 mile driving trips, we have been thinking deeply about this problem. Most … Read More

While the sycophant and pile-on press are predicting a “difficult” meeting today between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, the facts suggest the opposite. America suffers from being a bunch of phony sinophiles. Including most reporters. Sure, business students consider The Art of War a must-read book.  But a tiny fraction of those will … Read More

Elaine and I have both been working our tails off on projects around the homestead this week, so pardon the short column this morning. The biggest item left on my to-do list is getting the new 55” UHD monitor installed in the office.  It will replace the four existing monitors – 3 x 24” and … Read More

We have much to ponder:  New jobs report.  A winner.  Meanwhile, a series of Federal Reserve working papers has us considering the kind of future the Fed is looking at.  Then there’s more action by North Korea and a migration path to war with China if we screw the pooch in negotiations. But mainly, we’re … Read More

While we piddle a bit in the market, the real art of making money belongs to those who master the art of timing.  A deeper discussion in this morning’s Coping section following this. The question we can broadly ask this morning is a Trump Trend Change at hand? There are several reasons to believe this … Read More

Next time you get sick, I have a project for you. Spot the exact moment when you begin the transition from illness back to full health again. That is an “inflection point.” Simply stated, it is the instant of a trend reversal. It’s not limited to medicine, politics, economics, or statistics. It’s one of those … Read More

This may not make a lot of sense unless you read our discussion last Wednesday on the Peoplenomics side where I talked about the short-term trade we had on. But if you did read it, please be advised that we just closed the position and made a decent pile of “quarter pounders” worth. We’ll discuss … Read More

We run into this problem in economics (and other sciences) all the time. It’s called the Hidden Variable. Historically, in physics, hidden variable theories were espoused by some physicists who argued that the state of a physical system, as formulated by quantum mechanics, does not give a complete description for the system; i.e., that quantum … Read More

Technically, March through June in Tornado time.  It’s something we keep a close eye on, living as we do on the fringe of Tornado Alley. Sunday started off just fine:  Overcast and dry enough that I could finish putting deck screws into the small deck Elaine and I build Saturday off the “180° Room.” Having … Read More

There are some interesting accounting problems on the horizon for a lot of publicly held companies.  While they have benefited from the declining interest rate paradigm since 1980, if the bottom is really “in” on rates, any sudden moves could send corporate balance sheets seriously “out of whack” in a heartbeat. The result of that … Read More