Video Webcasts

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 7/17/24

Jul 17, 2024 1 min read paid

In congressional testimony last week, Fed Chair Powell sounded more dovish than he has this tightening cycle. That clinched financial markets’ growing expectation that the Fed would cut the federal funds rate as early as September. We believe so too. Now that inflation is closing in on the Fed’s 2.0% target, Fed officials are increasingly focused on keeping the unemployment rate low. … From today’s vantage point, it’

Eric Wallerstein

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 7/10/24

Jul 10, 2024 1 min read paid

Signs that the Fed might lower the federal funds rate soon have sent stocks soaring, even though those signs were weak economic data. So the Fed Put is back. We’re concerned that the Fed might ease too soon, switching its mandate focus from inflation to unemployment. That could be a wrong move given the likelihoods that the soft patch won’t grow into a recession and that trade policies

Ed Yardeni

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 7/3/24

Jul 3, 2024 1 min read paid

Personal consumption expenditures data for May suggest clear skies on both the inflation and income fronts: The PCED has been gliding steadily earthward and looks on course to reach the Fed’s 2.0% y/y destination for it by year-end. Consumer spending has been showing no sign of retrenchment, and consumption trends jibe with our rosy economic outlook. Moderating inflation with a robust economy argue against the Fed’s

Eric Wallerstein
Ed Yardeni

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 6/26/24

Jun 26, 2024 1 min read paid

The bull market has stampeded through some of the most optimistic price targets on Wall Street including ours. While we are sticking with our S&P 500 yearend target of 5400, we’re looking forward to the bull run lifting the index to 6000 by yearend 2025 and 6500 by yearend 2026. … Q1 earnings beat expectations causing industry analysts to revise upward their consensus estimates for this year and

Eric Wallerstein

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 6/19/24

Jun 19, 2024 1 min read paid

The rates of unemployment and inflation aren’t always inversely correlated, as the Phillips Curve model posits. Historically, they have often been; in recent times, not so much. The problem with the model is that it doesn’t account for the effects of productivity growth on price inflation. … The high rates of goods inflation experienced after the pandemic proved to be transitory, as we had anticipated. Services inflation has been

Ed Yardeni
Eric Wallerstein

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 6/12/24

Jun 12, 2024 1 min read paid

How the labor market is doing is critical to the Fed’s setting of monetary policy given its dual mandate to steer the economy away from both too-high unemployment and too-high inflation. But gauging how the labor market is doing can be a stumper: Two different employment indicators point in different directions. … Less ambivalent are the indicators of wage inflation: All point to continued moderation. … We believe the labor market

Ed Yardeni
Eric Wallerstein

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 6/5/24

Jun 5, 2024 1 min read paid

Our economic and S&P 500 forecasts are underpinned by our forecasts for corporate revenues, earnings, and profit margins. We often compare them to industry analysts’ consensus estimates for S&P 500 companies in aggregate and how they change over time in response to earnings reports. Today, we illustrate this process by showing how data from Q1’s earnings season have fed into our own annual and forward

Ed Yardeni

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 5/29/24

May 29, 2024 1 min read paid

Geopolitical events can shake up the stock market, sometimes providing buying opportunities. The current geopolitical landscape is unsettled and unsettling, with potentially seismic ramifications on several fronts and lots of uncertainties: Is Putin’s call for negotiations with Ukraine a nonstarter? Is it even real? Are US efforts at brokering peace in the Middle East progressing toward that end or is that notion wishful thinking? Does the heightened pitch of

Ed Yardeni
Eric Wallerstein

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 5/22/24

May 22, 2024 1 min read paid

Boomer-led households’ collective net worth has skyrocketed 19-fold since 1990. As the generation has lived long and prospered, so has the stock market (rising 40-fold over their adulthood) and the US economy (with nominal GDP up eightfold since 1982). Looking ahead, our Roaring 2020s scenario assumes faster-than-average growth for S&P 500 earnings, GDP, and productivity. Faster productivity growth should depress unit labor costs and inflation in a process

Ed Yardeni

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 5/16/24

May 16, 2024 1 min read paid

Today, we look at cracks in the story that consumers are cracking. Crack proponents expect consumers to start saving more and spending less because they’ve depleted their excess saving from the pandemic years. We expect personal saving rates to stay low and consumer spending to stay high as Baby Boomers, done with paying college tuitions and mortgage loans, spend their sizable nest eggs. (Many apparently are buying big-ticket items

Ed Yardeni

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 5/8/24

May 8, 2024 1 min read paid

Investors in both stock and bond markets are suddenly blooming with optimism. Both markets rallied on Friday’s (mostly) positive employment report, including yet another sub-4.0% jobless rate and despite some negatives in the report. Stoking the optimism, perversely, has been economic news suggesting weakening: Cheery investors have focused not on that but on the potential ramification of it, that interest rates won’t be kept higher for longer

Ed Yardeni

Dr Ed's Video Webcast 5/1/24

May 1, 2024 1 min read paid

One quarter does not stagflation make. True, the March quarter’s real GDP growth rate was down from the December quarter’s, while inflation was up—a combination that calls to mind “stagflation.” But the current economic scenario is nothing like the stagflationary environment of the late 1970s, when the combination of anemic GDP growth and out-of-control inflation crippled economic activity. … Today, we look at data confirming that economic activity

Ed Yardeni

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