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...
by pentoport | Nov 22, 2024 | Commentary
November 22, 2024 The Federal Reserve believes inflation is no longer a concern for consumers and the time has come to ensure the rate of change of prices does not decline any further. To this point, Susan Collins, the Boston Federal Reserve President, said recently...
by pentoport | Nov 15, 2024 | Commentary
November 15, 2024 Fiscal and monetary policy changes are what drive the data behind the 20 components in my IDEC Model. The election of DJT will most likely provide for significant fiscal and maybe even monetary policy changes. The political winds are behind lower...
by pentoport | Oct 2, 2024 | Commentary
October 1st 2024 So, the Fed has pivoted once again. Jerome Powell has done so many twists that Chubby Checker would be envious. Or better said, the Fed has panicked and now realized it is again offside on its inflation target. Hence, Powell feels compelled to move...
by pentoport | Sep 13, 2024 | Commentary
September 13, 2024 The labor market is clearly weakening. But in reality, this is what needs to happen. Short-term pain is needed to reconcile the great imbalances created by decades of free money. The alternative is intractable inflation that renders the middle class...
by pentoport | Aug 30, 2024 | Commentary
August 30, 2024 While the long-anticipated recession still lies ahead of us, the fact remains that the US economy is anemic and getting weaker. Therefore, it is imperative to be aware of the reasons why those predicting any sort of economic rebound should be extremely...
