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01 15 21 WOWS FULL ISSUE An Alternative Way To View Or Print The Entire Current Issue As A Single Document 1/15/21 Attention Paid-Up Subscribers: To read or print the entire current issue as a single document, use the "easyprint" feature in the "Nav bar" to the right to open it, or any of WOWS' individual features, as an Adobe PDF file, and then print it. Alternatively, you can click "more" at the bottom of this paragraph and then click the red Adobe icon that appears. Your second click will download the full issue .pdf file of WOWS' latest issue to your computer, a process that -- depending on the file size and your connection speed -- might take more than the blink of an eye. Then, depending on preferences you've set on your device, it will either open automatically or show up in your downloads folder, waiting to be opened. [More]
There’s no other way to put it, at least no other that springs to mind, than that it seemed like a perfectly good idea to start this year by interviewing GMO’s head of asset allocation, Ben Inker — a paragon of solid value investing principles and a deep thinker about ways to use the discipline to wring performance out of a market that’s been mostly hostile to its practitioners during this historic bull’s marathon run out of the depths of the Great Financial Crisis.
Especially good, it seemed since, just in the last couple of months, there have been days, amid the record highs, hinting of a turn in the works. It is, Ben agrees — Jeremy Grantham concurred just before we spoke — and Ben was prepared with insights aplenty. What we forgot, alas, is that we also seem to have an uncanny knack for touching base with each other amid political chaos.
By Jeremy Grantham Most of the time, perhaps three-quarters of the time, major asset classes are reasonably priced relative to one another. The correct response is to make modest bets on those assets that measure as being cheaper and hope that the measurements are correct.
By Dave Rosenberg I get asked all the time how the stock market (and risk-on assets in general) can manage to keep rallying as they did given the horrific events in Washington last week. One can ask the same question around the pandemic, because the S&P 500 is actually 600 points higher with the health crisis than it would have been without it.
By Anatole Kaletsky Do investors really prefer a divided US government? To judge by the market’s response to the Georgia run-off elections, the answer seems to be “no.” A preference for political unity is understandable, if one side of a divided government consists of the sort of people who rampaged through Washington on Wednesday the 6th, causing the suspension of Congress and delaying the final confirmation of Joe Biden as U.S. president and the final humiliation of Donald Trump as the ultimate sore loser (see After The Storming Of The Capitol).
By Charles Gave On Thursday, Anatole set out his view that undivided Democratic Party control of both the executive and legislative branches of the US government opens the door for unconstrained Keynesian stimulus, which will be highly positive for the U.S. economy and equities (see Investors Should Welcome An Undivided US Government).
By Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood In 2007, the first quarter Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages report showed Trumbull County, Ohio to have had the largest increase in y/y average weekly wages, 22.3%, compared to a US average of 5.1%. The stunning increase the result of severance payments at GM’s Lordstown Complex, in the quarters that followed Trumbull showed massive declines.
Employment Mobility The Belated Emergence Of The Black Middle Class 1/15/21 7:00 AM By Joshua Weitz, William Lazonick, and Philip Moss As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver the equal employment opportunity that was promised by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [More]
Chris Mooney, Andrew Freedman and John Muyskens Overall, climate scientists say the disasters of 2020 are but a preview of what’s to come if greenhouse gas emissions are not quickly curtailed.
“What keeps us climate scientists up in the dead of night is wondering what we don’t know about the self-reinforcing or vicious cycles in the Earth’s climate system,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech University, in an email. [More]
