It should have been no surprise that the FOMC decided at its first meeting of 2024 to hold rates constant. Its rationale was based upon a moderating but strong labor market, a low unemployment rate, an expanding economy, and a slowing inflation rate, but still above target.

Let’s begin this commentary with a hat tip to my friend Chris Whalen (Chairman, Whalen Global Advisors LLC, www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com), who sent out the following tweet about “gamma.” In it, Chris is quoting Nomura

Hundreds of millions of dollars spent; thousands of hours of media time consumed; incessant political punditry from the usual TV sources interspersed with a constant flow of disinformation from the auto-bot manipulators (even robocall fake voices); and continuous poisonous hate messaging – all…

This is a brief overview of Cumberland Advisors’ thoughts on financial markets as we head into 2024. We are coming off an unusual 2023, which was helped by good bond and equity markets late in the year. One of our basic investment tenets is that markets revert to the mean over periods of time,…

The graphic below is a Bloomberg-sourced depiction of what is happening to global shipping rates. (Hat tip to Cumberland’s Dan Himelberger for his help in finding the correct chart.)  The chart therein is worth a thousand words. About 45% of Europe’s shipping normally goes through the Red…

It looks like a budget, border, and immigrant-parole-exemption deal is coming fast so that a US government shutdown will be avoided in January. The usual 11th hour rules of Washington apply. Will Speaker Johnson end up like Speaker McCarthy after making a deal? That remains to be seen.

In the annals of research and analysis of war, geopolitical risk, and defense, one can find many “armchair generals.” They are in the mainstream media and on social media. I get emailed comments from some of them.