Articles authored by Sonu Varghese

It seems like there’s always one shoe or another ready to drop on the economy. There were fears over a government shutdown (punted for now) which Ryan wrote about, along with the restart of student loan payments and strikes. Other issues that have investors worried are another bank crisis (like Silicon Valley Bank), or a …

Strikes, student loans, and shutdown have been the top 3 concerns for investors in recent weeks. Earlier this week, Ryan wrote about the government shutdown, and I discussed why the student loan payment restart may not be a huge concern. I want to tackle strikes in this post. Strikes have been in the news recently, …

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about the potential impact of a government shutdown and the restart of student loan payments in October.  Ryan wrote about the government shutdown yesterday, while today I will take a closer look at the student loan payments restarting.  The fear is that a sudden resumption of payments will result …

It can be hard to get a handle on all the economic data that is continuously being released, and even worse, they can often send conflicting signals. One approach is to combine several indicators that typically give you an early warning signal about economic turning points into a single indicator, i.e. a “leading economic index” …

The Federal Reserve (Fed) chose to pause on interest rate hikes at their September meeting, leaving the federal funds rates unchanged at 5.25-5.50%. This was not unexpected, but the members did give us a lot of new information. They updated their economic projections, i.e. their views of what the economy, employment, and inflation will do …

We get a lot of questions about US debt, and a lot of concerns revolve around the fact that foreigners hold a lot of it. The question typically is: What happens if they decide to sell, especially the Chinese? I’m going to dive into all of it in this blog. The US government has a …

The economy has stayed surprisingly resilient in the face of the most aggressive Federal Reserve (Fed) in 40+ years. A large part of that has to do with a strong labor market that has surprised a lot of economists and market watchers. Now, employment is certainly slowing from its torrid pace earlier this year, but …

At the beginning of the year, we titled our 2023 Outlook “The Edge of Normal”, as we expected markets and the economy to normalize in 2023. What we saw as the year progressed confirmed that view, so much so that our Mid-Year Outlook was titled “Edging closer to Normal”. Normalization has now continued into August. …

We started the year believing the economy would avoid a recession and that markets would rebound, and everything that’s happened since has mostly reinforced that view, which we outlined in our Mid-Year Outlook. At the same time, investing is about dealing with probabilities as opposed to thinking in terms of binary outcomes. Ryan and I …

We’ve gotten a lot of questions on China, including what’s happening there and how it’ll impact the US, and potentially, financial markets. We’re going to tackle all of those in this blog. 1. What’s happening in China? The economy is in trouble. Retail sales are up just 2.5% year over year, well off the pre-pandemic …