Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
As a portfolio manager, I start each morning by consuming copious amounts of a heavily caffeinated beverage and a data feed from a litany of web and blog sites. Over the last few days, as asset prices have set new records, there have been numerous articles on whether the market is currently in a bubble. Here are a few I grabbed from a Google search:
After dropping to an all time low 62.9% in Q2 of 2016, the US homeownership rate rebounded modestly in the subsequent two quarters, then dropped again at the start of the year, before once again rising fractionally to 63.7% in Q2 of 2017 from 63.6% in the previous quarter, just 1% from the all time lows in the series history going back to the mid 1960s.
While The FOMC statement yesterday had a little for everyone (dovish inflationary comments and hawkish employment and balance sheet normalization), the bottom line is that, as former fund manager Richard Breslow notes, Yellen has kicked the can down the road one more time to avoid making any decision before the start of autumn: "they are only human and well aware of the fact that August has repeatedly been a cruel month for upsetting their best-laid plans for September."
Via Bloomberg,
The Trump fiscal agenda - which these days really means tax reform - may be dead, but that does not mean it can't reemerge as a zombie every now and then. That's precisely what happened moments ago when Paul Ryan just announced that after months of speculation whether border adjustment tax will or won't be implemented to help offset Trump's proposed tax cuts, it is now officially dead.
As Reuters adds:
Authored by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute,
The Federal Reserve (Fed) is widely expected to continue to tighten its monetary policy this year. According to a latest Reuters Poll, the Fed is likely to start shrinking its US$4 trillion balance sheet in September and, moreover, raise further its key interest rate, which is currently standing in a range of 1.0 to 1.25 percent, in the fourth quarter this year.