Why the Treasury Market is Behaving Badly

April 17, 2025 The US 10-year Benchmark rate jumped by 50 bps in just the 5 days from April 7th to the 11th. That is a very unusual and humongous move in such a short period of time. The question is, why would that volatility occur in the context of a slowing economy,...

The Fog of Tariffs

April 11, 2025 There was a near-record number of job layoff announcements during the month of March, according to the labor research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. There was a total of 275,240 layoff announcements last month. The level of layoffs was eclipsed...

Fed Follies on Full Display

March 21, 2025 The University of Michigan Consumer confidence survey for March plunged to 57.9 versus the estimate of 63 and 65.7 in the month prior. And yet, inflation expectations in the same survey hit a 32-year high of 4.9%. Stagflation is the word that comes to...

Cash is King for Now

March 3, 2025 Tariff threats and a shrinking labor force put downward pressure on stocks and the economy. The S&P 500 is trading at 22x the forward 12-month EPS target, which is predicting an increase of 13% in EPS. The problem is that the 10-year average PE ratio...

Liquidity and Inflation

February 7th, 2025 I want to expand a bit on market liquidity and why modeling it is so crucial to the economy, inflation, and money management. Liquidity is the progenitor of Pento Portfolio Strategies’ Inflation Deflation and Economic Cycle (IDEC) model. It is the...