by pentoport | Apr 17, 2025 | Commentary
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,...
by pentoport | Apr 11, 2025 | Commentary
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...
by pentoport | Mar 21, 2025 | Commentary
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...
by pentoport | Mar 3, 2025 | Commentary
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...
by pentoport | Feb 7, 2025 | Commentary
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...
by pentoport | Jan 17, 2025 | Commentary
January 17th 2025 US corporations’ hiring plans last year totaled 769,953 workers, the fewest since 2015, according to the labor research firm Challenger, Grey, and Christmas. Private sector data shows that the need to hire new employees for all of last year...