By Robert Romano In Tuesday trading, the Shanghai Composite index was off more than 3.5 percent, the Sept. 2015 Empire State Manufacturing Survey showed business activity declined for a second consecutive month for New York manufacturers, and retail sales missed expectations . And so, naturally, U.S. stock markets rallied in anticipation that the bad news might forestall a Federal Reserve interest rate hike on Thursday. Such […]

By Rick Manning Adults set priorities. They make tough choices between things they need as opposed to those they simply want when deciding how to spend their paychecks. When beef goes up in price suddenly more chicken appears on the dinner table. When the cost of gasoline […]

By Robert Romano The national debt has been frozen at about $18.15 trillion for almost six months , according to the U.S. Treasury. Did Congress accidentally balance the budget? No. It is because way back in February 2014 Congress gave President Barack Obama a blank check to borrow as much money as he needed to cover U.S. financing […]

By Robert Romano With its policy interest rate still at near-zero percent, and deficits much smaller than were seen in the wake of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has little room to maneuver when the next recession comes. On interest rates, as a practical matter, the Fed cannot go lower than zero . […]

By Robert Romano If electricity consumption is supposed to be a reliable proxy for economic growth, the only conclusion one can come to is that the U.S. economy has not grown in any meaningful sense since 2007. That year, the U.S. consumed about 3.89 trillion kilowatt hours […]

By Robert Romano Last week, global equity markets were tanking in the midst of a major correction, largely in response to what was happening in China where stock markets are down nearly 40 percent since they peaked in June. Then, suddenly, it stopped. U.S. markets rebounded, and soon it appeared the panic had abated. What changed? Chinese government intervention. In […]

By Robert Romano “I expect the normalization of monetary policy — that is, interest rates — to begin sometime this year. I expect normalization to proceed gradually, the implication being an environment of rather low rates for quite some time.” That was Dennis P. Lockhart, president of […]

By Rick Manning What the heck is going on in the economy? The stock market plummets, rebounds and drops again by the time this publishes. Gasoline prices are flat even as the price of oil drops precipitously below the $40 a barrel level, down a full $55 a barrel since one year ago. The […]

By Robert Romano Beijing has launched a preemptive strike on the West and on other emerging economies, devaluing its currency by about 2 percent in a move that now threatens to disrupt the balance of trade worldwide. This could be the beginning of China’s own brand of quantitative easing, and it comes after the People’s Bank of China had briefly allowed the yuan to appreciate . It […]

By Robert Romano On July 9, former Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush proclaimed that if Americans wanted higher incomes and to get back to 4-percent-a-year economic growth, they need to work longer hours. “[P]eople need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain […]