Our general understanding of “between a rock and a hard place” is that there is a problem and we have two options, neither of which is desirable. (And since we are in the middle of a Rolling Stones tour, we should also point out that “Rock and a Hard Place” was also on the Stones Steel Wheels…

The preliminary flash estimate of France’s real GDP in the third quarter is a strong quarter-to-quarter 3% advance, considerably above the 2.2% advance for the euro area and the 1.8% gain for Germany. The US economy grew only 0.5% during the quarter. A sharp acceleration of household consumption…

Cumberland has utilized separately managed accounts (SMAs) to execute its fixed-income strategy since the company’s inception in 1973, long before SMAs were popularized in the early 2000s.

On Friday, October 28, three interesting data releases came out that may further complicate the FOMC’s decision process at its November meeting. First, we got the reading on PCE for the month of September, which is up 0.2 percentage points from 4.2% in August to 4.4% in September. This increase…

We get a lot of questions about Florida. So we thought we would recommend a book that friends Carla and Pete suggested to us.

Faced with continued inflationary pressures far above the FOMC’s 2% target, a strong labor market but one that is far from what might be considered full employment, and an economy growing at somewhere in the 2% range in the past couple of months, should the FOMC start tapering…

Chinese authorities have urged (we don’t know what “urge” means) Evergrande’s founder, Hui Ka Yan, to use his personal funds to help pay Evergrande’s debt obligations. Other Chinese companies have been advised to prepare to meet payments due on their offshore bonds as well.…

A fishing buddy and longtime friend, Danny Blanchflower, is Professor of Economics at Dartmouth. His collaborator Alex Bryson is Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, University College, London. Together these two economists have been looking at the predictive…

We have written recently about the jobs situation in the United States. See “Jobs, Wages, the Outlook?” https://www.cumber.com/market-commentary/jobs-wages-outlook. We expect the employment picture to worsen, which means continuing upward pressure on wages and continuing shortages of labor…

Readers have been asking about our view of the economic recovery and the labor force. We are receiving mixed signals from economic data, and the bottom-line answer is uncertain. Let’s get to details and some suggested readings and end with my personal view.