It’s been hard to miss the impressive run up in stock prices over the past 12 months – the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for example, gained 22% in the year ended May 31 – and for some, that creates a conundrum. Writing in the New…
David Stockman, former Republican congressman and former budget director under Ronald Reagan, wrote an inflammatory op-ed piece in the New York Times a week ago Sunday (State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America) in which he declared “this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood…
The eponymous John Denver song of our title came to us today as we completed the final day of our semi-annual staff retreat, which was faciliated by our Rocky Mountain friend David Brand on the same day that the S&P 500 stock index attained a new…
We’re sure that you’re sick and tired of hearing about the fiscal cliff at this point, and we don’t blame you. The looming tax increases and spending cuts have spawned no end of “cliffhangers” and “Cliff Notes” describing the impending doomsday if Congress and the White…
New Blended Benchmark We’ve added a new blended benchmark to our monthly portfolio performance reports that we thought you’d like to hear about. Beginning with the current batch of reports posted a few days ago, a new blended benchmark appears in several places. First, the…
We’ve all heard more than enough about the Fiscal Cliff that looms at year’s end and the ongoing negotiations between the White House and Congress aimed at avoiding it. As you might imagine, we’ve expended a great deal of time and energy analyzing the various…
We’ve all heard about the Simpson Bowles Commission (technically, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform), which was created by President Obama in early 2010 and delivered its final report on December 1 of that same year. Neither Congress nor the White House embraced…
Today is October 19, the 25th anniversary of Black Monday, the day in 1987 when the Dow fell by more than 22%, still the largest one-day percentage drop in the history of the index. The chart below, showing the level of the Dow throughout 1987, vividly illustrates…