Archive for May, 2020

INFLUENTIAL ECONOMIST PAUL MCCULLEY ON THE LASTING NECESSITY OF RECORD MONETARY & FISCAL STIMULUS

Central banks and governments around the world are pulling out all the stops to replace income lost from COVID-19 shutdowns, including as we have seen in the United States direct payments to individuals.

We are devoting a WEALTHTRACK podcast this week to “Helicopter Money”, a concept coined by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman who theorized that as a last resort in a deflationary depression the government could drop dollar bills from a helicopter for people to pick up and spend to “shock it out of a deep slump” with the “aim of boosting demand and inflation.”
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REALLY CHEAP MARKETS AND THE PANDEMIC’S HIDDEN TOLL WITH FINANCIAL THOUGHT LEADER ROB ARNOTT

Can investing be simple? With the 20/20 vision of hindsight it sure looks that way.  Had investors just decided to stay in the U.S., invest in growth stocks, especially mega-cap tech stocks they would have hit the trifecta over the last decade or more.

Has the COVID-19 pandemic changed that formula for success? It has not. If anything it seems to have accelerated and accentuated it.

The extended FAANG family known by the acronym FAANGM for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google’s parent Alphabet, and Microsoft recently comprised close to 24% of the total market cap of the S&P 500, topping what dot com stocks reached at the height of the tech bubble. 

Left in the dust by this juggernaut combination of U.S mega-cap tech are other stock market sectors including value stocks, small company stocks, and international markets, particularly emerging markets.

It just so happens that those are the very areas that this week’s guest believes we should be focusing on now.

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