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The Retired Investor: The Trump Economy 101
By Bill Schmick,
04:06PM / Thursday, March 27, 2025
For those of us in the business world, the myriad economic policy initiatives spewing from the White House are both confusing and at times difficult to understand.    Certain policies seem to cancel each other out. Full employment while reducing immigration, drill-baby-drill to force oil prices lower while raising tariffs to increase prices?    The point is that if even the professionals are having difficulty, how can those with little financial background hope to understand where the economy is going and why?   It appears, for example, that economic growth may be moderating as consumer spending weakens, while inflation remains stubborn.

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@theMarket: Fed No Longer in the Driver's Seat
By Bill Schmick,
03:25PM / Friday, March 21, 2025
This week, the Federal Reserve Bank hiked its inflation forecast and reduced the growth target for the economy this year. Despite this news, traders termed the March FOMC meeting a "dovish pause," although it did not help the stock market.   The upshot of Chairman Jerome Powell's Q&A session on Wednesday afternoon after the FOMC meeting was that as far as the future is concerned, the Fed would need to wait and see just like the rest of us. In the meantime, the bank decided to slow its quantitative tightening program. That was interpreted as dovish by most Fed watchers since it does add liquidity to the credit markets.   Powell did say tariffs

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The Retired Investor: Foreign Money Going Home as American Market Dominance Begins to Fall
By Bill Schmick,
04:38PM / Thursday, March 20, 2025
The Trump administration's economic policies have placed a target on the back of most foreign nations. As for the economy, a slowdown, if not a recession, seems to be around the corner. As such, overseas investors have little reason to remain in America's financial markets.   Foreign investors represent about 17 percent of the overall holdings in the U.S. equity market and about the same in the bond market. Over the last 15 years, as I wrote in my previous column, American markets were the only game in town. While our share of the world's economy was only 27 percent, our share of the world's total investments was 70 percent.   America was

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@theMarket: The Markets' Flash Correction
By Bill Schmick,
03:17PM / Friday, March 14, 2025
The market's decline has been one of the fastest in history. The fall has been fueled by the Trump administration's economic policies. The question most investors are wrestling with is what to do about it.   Looking back on this period in a year or two, I guarantee that most investors will have trouble remembering exactly what happened. There is nothing abnormal in this decline thus far except its speed. It is a simple garden variety pullback, which occurs at least once a year if not more. It is the price of doing business for equity investors and savers with tax-deferred retirement accounts.   Given that, the decline is probably a good thing for an

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The Retired Investor: U.S. Dominance of Global Markets
By Bill Schmick,
04:15PM / Thursday, March 13, 2025
It has been a great run. For 15 years, the U.S. stock market has been the envy of the world. Led by the FANG stocks, global investors could not get enough of American stocks — until now.   By the end of 2024, global investors had committed more capital to America than ever before. At the same time, the dollar traded at a higher value than ever since the world abandoned fixed exchange rates 50 years ago.   While America's share of the global economy was 27 percent, its stock market represented 70 percent of the worldwide stock market. Since 1992, every year China has grown closer to the U.S. as the world's biggest economy. China's GDP has grown

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