While the June employment report monopolized financial media headlines, a potentially bigger game-changer went little noticed: spreads over Treasuries of high-yield emerging-market (EM) corporate bonds began creeping up.

At the beginning of summer, U.S. payrolls were not growing as fast as markets had expected. However, the reason was not slowing demand and diminished pressure to increase pay. It was the opposite.

In this excerpt from the April 2021 issue of The Levy Forecast®, David Levy discusses how difficult adjustments and financial struggles in the next several years will sow the seeds of a great economic boom.

Consensus earnings estimates were revised sharply higher in the run-up to the first-quarter earnings season, making some investors worried that actual earnings would disappoint. Robert King wrote in April that disappointment was unlikely and that large, favorable increases in guidance for future quarters were to be expected.

The high-flying 2021 U.S. economy is a mixed blessing for emerging market (EM) economies. John Nahra wrote in April to expect EM assets, currencies, and economies broadly to underperform those of the United States for the balance of 2021.

How the Long-Term Swelling of Household and Business Sector Balance Sheets Has Increasingly Forced Lenders, Investors, and Borrowers to Sacrifice Prudence, Financial Rewards, or Both.

In 2019, gold and silver prices appeared to benefit from some new influences, which could have some staying power as long as the global economy is stumbling but not yet falling.

In the face of developing global distress, global equity markets demonstrated remarkable resilience in the first half of 2019. In this excerpt from the June 2019 issue of The Levy Forecast, David Levy address four popular but faulty rationales for holding equities.

Bond rallies have become progressively bigger during stock market declines, thereby providing more effective hedging. This hedging feature has become more valuable as global balance sheets have swelled relative to incomes and deflationary forces have spread.

Market expectations for Chinese stimulus were high at the beginning of 2019. In this piece, Srinivas Thiruvadanthai takes a closer look at Chinese credit and monetary aggregates data and finds that the early-2019 credit push did not translate into increased economic activity or net increases in profit sources.