Since 1973, Cumberland Advisors has been a trusted source for market expertise, personal service, and individual and institutional money management. We are an independent, fee-for-service money management firm managing approximately $4 billion in assets.
In the depths of the muni market plunge back in March, many feared that the sky had fallen and that municipalities would not be able to manage their services and debt repayment. The initial fall in prices was due to a collapse of liquidity, when muni money market funds had no one to sell to […]
The Cumberland State of Despair Index tries to capture the despair caused by unemployment brought on by the pandemic and COVID-19 infection rates on a state-by-state basis. This State of Despair Index will be applied as a variable in our credit-scoring model.
The positive jobs growth news, showing an increase of 638,000 jobs in October and a full one percent reduction in the unemployment rate to 6.9%, masked a decline in government employment. Private jobs were up by 906,000, led by an increase of 271,000 in hospitality and leisure, a sector that has been hit particularly hard […]
On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that this year’s California fires had scorched more ground than the last three years of fires combined. Higher temperatures and greater winds have contributed to the spread. Year-to-date, the California fires have covered 4 million acres in 8,200 fires throughout the state. Some 8,400 homes and buildings have been lost, and […]
Many municipal entities are under extreme stress and federal help is needed now.
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. The reasons for managing money in this fashion are the same today as they were then: • Transparency (you know what you own) • Flexibility to make strategic […]
Excerpt below. By Shelly Sigo – The Bond Buyer August 31, 2020 Florida plans to “opportunistically” take advantage of historically low taxable municipal bond rates in a $2.25 billion deal that a state official said should be attractive for yield-starved investors. Proceeds will provide capital to pay claims, if needed, by the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe […]
In the Indian Ocean they are called cyclones, in the Pacific Ocean, typhoons. The latter term comes from the Chinese tai fung, which translates as “great wind.” The Kʼicheʼ Mayans called their god of wind, storm, and fire Hurakan. European colonists adopted the word, and it became hurricane. (Source: A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s […]
The Northeast continues to clean up from Hurricane Isaias, which swept up the Atlantic coast to New York and parts of New England on Thursday. Below is a slide from a presentation by our good friend Tom Doe, who heads up Municipal Market Advisors (http://www.mma-research.com). Tom’s firm does in-depth quantitative and qualitative research on the […]
In our opinion this is a short-term shock, although it will likely change some behaviors for the long term that will need to be monitored. The initial concern is liquidity, not just in the bond market but also at the state level, where tax payment dates have been extended and economically sensitive revenues such as […]
