The most powerful institution in global finance is as completely and utterly confused as the rest of us.

It’s premature to assume that tariffs won’t push up inflation, but the developments have been pretty encouraging thus far.

Wall Street analyst outlooks are typically bullish. If you aggregate every price target on every S&P 500 Index company and weight them to match the index, it’s exceedingly rare for the overall number to fall.

f you are wondering why the S&P 500 Index has held up so well in the past two months, look no further than the technology and communications sectors, which collectively account for nearly half of the index by weighting.

Moody’s Ratings has followed S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings in stripping the US of its top-notch credit score, lowering it one level to Aa1.

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the company he built alongside his later partner Charlie Munger for the past six decades.

Delta Air Lines Inc. and the parent of Frontier Airlines recently yanked earnings guidance for 2025, with JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon saying that he expects “to see more of that.”

President Donald Trump has said his reciprocal tariff policy was meant to stand up for the American worker, whom he portrayed as the victim of a decades-long shift toward unfettered globalization.

President Donald Trump’s new reciprocal tariff policy is straightforwardly bad for the US economy and markets. The only conceivable reason that the S&P 500 Index was down just 4% on Thursday is that investors still don’t believe it will stick. Unfortunately, there’s no quick way out of this quagmire.

President Donald Trump has pledged to hit countries on Wednesday with “reciprocal tariffs,” whatever that means. In the president’s characterization, the US will raise tariffs to a level that’s suitably high to match the tariff and non-tariff barriers that our exporters face in international markets.

The world is a risky place, and high-yield debt spreads to safe US Treasury securities are close to historic levels of stinginess, signaling complacency in markets — at least on the surface. But legendary investor Howard Marks says that’s the wrong way to look at it and long-term investors should consider allocations to credit.

On the predictable side, the Fed kept policy rates in a range of 4.25%-4.5%, and the rate-setting committee pledged to slow the pace at which it’s allowing securities to roll off its balance sheet.

Markets will be laser focused on Federal Reserve policy and economic projections next week, looking for signs about where interest rates are heading.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. released its latest shareholder letter Saturday, and the content is — by and large — the usual timeless Warren Buffett fare.

I recently asked DeepSeek to model the impact of artificial intelligence on US labor productivity growth.

The S&P 500 Index plummeted as much as 2.3% on Monday over DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup that developed a model competitive with the US’s very best — and, supposedly, on the cheap.

Most people assume that the S&P 500 Index will go up over long holding periods.

It’s that time of year when Wall Street soothsayers look ahead 12 months and try to divine the path of US stocks.

America’s national debt would have horrified Ronald Reagan.

In normal times, the conduct of monetary policy is a lot like driving a car through a thick fog of uncertainty. You have a general idea of where you’re going, but you want to move slowly to avoid accidents. At the moment, it’s more like driving while double blindfolded — in a car with malfunctioning brakes. The most prudent move is to stop.

Inflation optimists were riding high at the start of 2024. Price pressures seemed to be cooling quickly, and market pricing suggested that the Federal Reserve might lower policy rates by a whopping 1.75 percentage points this year.

There was a great chart in a recent Goldman Sachs Group Inc. report that got me wondering whether medium-size companies might have superpowers. Here’s my adaptation of the original graphic

Growth prospects for the group of companies dubbed the Magnificent 7 are still above average, but they’re no longer magnificent. Consensus Wall Street forecasts suggest that, in aggregate, the seven large-capitalization companies will perform just a whisker better than the “S&P 493” next year...

The post-election stock market is already giving investors a wild ride. Big individual stock selloffs, massive rallies, and a dizzying array of market narratives built on Wall Street’s best attempts to read President-elect Donald Trump’s mind.

We’ve had several weeks of strong data since the Federal Reserve cut policy rates by a half percentage point. It started with a surprisingly robust jobs report, followed by a janky and above-expectations inflation report.

Machine learning is ubiquitous in financial markets, and we tend to associate it with the sexy parts of hedge fund investing: what to buy, what to sell and how to pick a bottom or a top.

The top corporate conference calls are attended by dozens of Wall Street analysts whose job it is to maintain detailed earnings and valuation models filled with minutiae. Quarter after quarter, they populate their spreadsheets with revenue and cost assumptions to predict exactly what earnings per share will be months and years into the future.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday began its policy easing with a bang. Much of the focus was on its decision to cut interest rates by half a percentage point from a two-decade high. But the key question for the bond market is where rates will land once all is said and done. Nobody knows for sure, and Chair Jerome Powell injected enough uncertainty to ensure a choppy ride ahead.

Consumer staples are one of the sleepiest sectors of the US stock market. Investors buy them for their low volatility and generous dividends, not exhilarating upside potential. But lately, toothpaste, bleach and certain big-box food retailers seem to be acting like the new semiconductors.

Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve seemed to have time on its side. Payrolls were growing at a healthy clip and the unemployment rate hovered near a five-decade low. Even though there were signs that inflation was licked, there didn’t appear to be much harm in keeping interest rates elevated for a while longer — just in case.

In some ways, central banking requires a trader’s instincts. Policymakers need to marry academic rigor with quick reflexes. There is a time for rumination and a time for action.

The US stock market has given us plenty of real and perceived calendar anomalies to think about. There’s the observed tendency for stocks to experience a “Santa Claus rally” (during the last five trading days of the year and the first two of the next) and the weekend effect (where stocks have a habit of slumping on Mondays).

Despite what you may have heard from the doomers, the US labor market is hardly falling apart at the seams. Layoffs are still extraordinarily low and a report Friday showed that the overall unemployment rate slipped to just 4.2%.

Since the pandemic, Wall Street strategists have repeatedly underestimated the performance of the US stock market in their annual projections, leading to a mad dash to boost their outlooks in the back end of the year.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday removed all doubt that interest rate cuts are just around the corner. “The time has come for policy to adjust,” he said at his much-hyped annual speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, setting off a knee-jerk rally in stocks and bonds.

The term “recession” made a big comeback in news stories and social media posts this month. Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Chief Economist Jan Hatzius was among those who formally bumped up his odds of a downturn to considerable media hoopla.

If rising layoffs and weakening consumption are going to snowball into a US recession at some point, my interpretation is that the mass of macroeconomic ice crystals is still only about the size of a marble.

Regulators and investors have always had a keen interest in the trades that corporates executives and board members make in their companies’ own shares. The government has to look out for the integrity of financial markets, of course, while investors are eager to ride insiders’ coattails. Unfortunately, it’s never been easy to read the insider tea leaves.

Warren Buffett has been selling a lot of stock, and that revelation is inducing his many admirers to follow suit. His Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., reported Saturday that it reduced several positions and slashed its stake in top-holding Apple Inc., a sign to some in markets that the “Oracle of Omaha” was bracing for deep stock-market declines.

In markets and economics, you sometimes have to hold two thoughts in your head simultaneously — an important lesson on a day in which the US unemployment rate unexpectedly surged to its highest in nearly three years.

Economists Stephen Miran and Nouriel Roubini are making waves by suggesting in a paper published last week that the Treasury Department has actively engineered easier financial conditions by increasing the issuance of short-term bills and, consequently, reducing the share of longer-term notes and bonds, thereby keeping yields lower than they would otherwise be.

The mortgage lock-in effect ended in the Levin household shortly before my in-laws arrived from Mexico to celebrate my daughter’s birthday at our home in the Miami area. As usual, my wife and I had no place to put them, and they had to get a room at a Courtyard Marriott.

For the better part of 2024, market commentators have bemoaned the fact that a few mega-capitalization stocks, dubbed the Magnificent Seven, appeared to be carrying the entire US market.

Back in 2021, legions of critics lambasted the Federal Reserve for failing to take proactive and forward-looking steps against the emerging inflation threat. Curiously, many of them have gone silent on the risk that the Fed might get caught flatfooted again, this time by failing to cut interest rates soon enough in the face of weaker inflation and a cooling labor market.

Human nature is such that there are always some folks who put a negative spin on obviously good news.

Thursday’s wildly encouraging consumer price index report shows that the Federal Reserve should be cutting policy rates at its meeting later this month. Unfortunately, they’ll probably keep us waiting until September.

Piper Sandler & Co. is eliminating its price target for the S&P 500 Index. Its Wall Street counterparts should follow suit.

The Federal Reserve will begin a review of its monetary policy framework later this year, including a potential reconsideration of the ways it communicates with the public. Of great interest is the fate of the dot plot, an anonymous collection of policymakers’ interest rate projections that generates considerable attention each quarter on Wall Street.

Wednesday is shaping up to be a doozy in the US bond market. Following the release of the consumer price index at 8:30 a.m. in Washington, investors will turn to the Federal Reserve’s policy rate decision at 2 p.m., which includes an update to policymakers’ carefully scrutinized economic projections.