US-China Trade War Weighing On World’s Growth, IMF Says

The Federal Reserve is poised to begin at least a six-month operation to buy about $60 billion of Treasury bills per month, as the central bank seeks to ease cash shortages that caused a recent spike in the overnight cost of borrowing. “They are going for it,” said Ralph Axel, an interest rate strategist at Bank of America. The Federal Open Market Committee said it had…

When Facebook unveiled ambitious plans in June to spearhead the creation of a global digital currency, co-founder David Marcus promised unprecedented cooperation among some of the biggest names in technology and payments. Some former members told the Financial Times that they felt Facebook underestimated the regulatory scrutiny that the project would…

Dr. Markowitz, a dentist in Washington, D.C., took out a mortgage to buy a home for his family, but that’ s the extent of his borrowing. Like Dr. Markowitz, Bill Malloy has been thinking about retirement planning a lot since turning 50 a couple of years ago. But after running a small business for nearly three decades, he’ s comfortable carrying debt.“ There really isn’ t a good…

According to the National Cancer Institute, one in three women and one in two men will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/551998 That means no professional advisor can avoid dealing with the impact of cancer on clients and their families and loved ones. While dealing with the more technical ramifications…

–To Charles Schwab, who brought stock-market investing to the masses with his eponymous discount brokerage, socialism evokes a grim, unremitting sameness– a death knell for creativity. “If you’ d like socialism, we all drive the same car or have the same color house or same size of house, blah, blah, blah– we’ re all the same fundamentally,” he said recently in an interview at…

Fidelity Investments and the state of Florida pension fund said Tuesday they’ re examining their relationship with Fisher Investments. The Philadelphia Board of Pensions said it plans to divest the $54 million in assets held with the firm. The Florida State Board of Administration, which has about $175 million with Fisher, was concerned enough about the…

Another significant funding accrual related to its retail sales-practices scandal contributed to Wells Fargo& Co. reporting Tuesday a 26% decline in third-quarter net income to $4.04 billion. The bank set aside $1.6 billion in the third quarter following an $800 million accrual in the second quarter. Besides the 35- cent earnings charge related to the $1.6…

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders defended their proposals to heavily tax the assets held by the wealthiest Americans to create a number of new government programs, as their more centrist opponents either dodged the question or pushed back against the idea. The intraparty feud comes amid the rapid growth of inequality in the United States, with the 400…

Wells Fargo’s third quarter earnings report had analysts on the edge of their seats to see what will become of the bank under its new CEO, Charles Scharf, after several years of mismanagement and scandal that have kept share prices low and morale even lower.

Are GE’s pensions 76% funded? Or are they 95% funded? It depends.

Financial markets and trading are no longer suitable for human activities, and best left to machine learning and algorithms. The old image of brokers rushing round the stock market to place their orders or the trading room filled with traders with a telephone in each ear are now an anachronism.

Most women, sooner rather than later, will end up alone. The Boston Consulting Group conducted a study in 2009, “Women Want More,” which discovered women around the world identified the financial services industry as the one they are most dissatisfied with for both service and products. Even more startling: In a 2001 article in Financial Advisor Magazine, Tracey…

The roughly 20% decline for large stocks in October 1929 actually wasn’t market’s worst month ever, but the drop incited nearly 3 years of selling.

James Knightley of ING reports that US consumer price inflation undershot expectations in September and with the growth outlook deteriorating the Fed has the flexibility to offer more“ insurance” rate cuts:. US headline inflation was flat on the month versus expectations of a 0.1% month on month gain, which leaves the annual rate of inflation at 1.7%. Meanwhile…

A former head of the Federal Reserve says the U.S. economy remains in good shape overall but with risks ahead, including modest growth, an aging population, weak gains in worker productivity and high federal deficits. Yellen, an economist, in the late 1990 s was on the White House Council of Economic Advisors a group President Truman created and then was in several…

—The state of Michigan’s retirement systems have ended a contract with an investment company that managed more than $600 million in pension funds after the CEO made “completely unacceptable” comments at a conference. The decision came two days after the Camas, Washington- based company’s founder and CEO Ken Fisher spoke at the Tiburon CEO Summit in San…

“Companies are starting to do what they do when there is rampant uncertainty, which is just stop issuing guidance,” said Savita Subramanian, head of United States equity strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.“ Companies just basically go dark.”. The“ rampant uncertainty” that Ms. Subramanian referred to flows from many sources: signs that the economy and job growth…

Last week, Charles Schwab, the mega-discount broker, disrupted the brokerage industry yet again by dropping its per-trade commission rates for U.S. and Canadian stocks, exchange-traded funds, and options for both mobile and internet trades. Since Schwab’s announcement Oct. 1, three additional big brokers- TD Ameritrade, E-Trade and Fidelity Investments- have…

“One way to protect your hard-earned money is to learn how to spot investment scams and to stay clear of them,” said SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. For example, the SEC recently took enforcement action against boiler-room-like call centers that swindled investors by allegedly: creating a false sense of urgency and asking investors to submit personal documents for…

With signs pointing toward a possible recession, investors have good reason to worry about their portfolios. Investors are likely to shift gears if they feel their advisors aren’t doing enough, thus, advisors must proactively conduct portfolio reviews and meet with clients to discuss appropriate safety net levels and the timing of future cash needs. Recessions occur several times in an investor’s saving lifetime, and portfolios should reflect their financial needs rather than the rise or fall of the markets.

Billionaire money manager Ken Fisher has come under fire for crass sexually charged comments he was said to have made Tuesday as part of a closed-door “fireside chat” at San Francisco’s Ritz Carlton Hotel.

WASHINGTON- The U.S. trade deficit widened in August for the first time in three months as exports increased but imports increased more. The politically sensitive gap with China in the trade of goods narrowed. The U.S. and China are locked in a dispute over American allegations that Beijing uses predatory tacitcs- including outright cybertheft- in a drive to…

A panel of leading economists is dialing down its forecasts for U.S. economic growth next year and putting strong odds on a recession in 2021.. “Eighty percent of the panelists see risks weighted to the downside,” Constance Hunter, president of the National Association for Business Economics, said Monday at the group’s annual meeting in Denver.

CNBC’s Bob Pisani reports that the stock market went from worried to rally mode on Friday:. The market is in a slow melt-up mode on Friday. There was a volume spike at 11:30 a.m. as European markets closed and as the S&P 500 passed the earlier highs of the day at 10:00 a.m. ET, a technical move in-line with typical momentum action, JP Morgan’ s Marko Kolanovic noted in…

The Federal Reserve’s new round of interest-rate reductions just might be working. That’s a clear sign that the rate cuts are shoring up investor confidence in heavily indebted companies-the segment of corporate America that’s perhaps most at risk to any downturn that hits the U.S. economy. The change in heart comes as the Fed seeks to stoke growth by reducing…

President Trump has an impressive defense for why he shouldn’ t be impeached: The economy is just too darn good! “How do you impeach a President who has created the greatest Economy in the history of our Country? If so, that would certainly be news to Bill Clinton.

An organization of business experts said in a new survey Monday the U.S. economy will grow by less than 2 percent in 2020– the slowest pace in three years. The National Association for Business Economics said in its October outlook it expects U.S. gross domestic product to grow by just 1.8 percent next year– a decline from the 2.1 percent projection it made in June.

An attorney for Stephen Cook, a broker who sued Ohio National to recoup trail commissions, said his client will appeal an Oct. 2 ruling dismissing his lawsuit.

U.S. unemployment fell to 3.5 percent in September, a 50- year low, the non-farm payroll report showed on Friday. 136,000 jobs were created last month after 168,000 were created in August, marking the 108th consecutive month of payroll gains. Also creeping in to paint a negative picture were fresh concerns about the upcoming trade negotiations between the U.S….

Roughly half of U.S. investors, 53%, report they have provided financial assistance, personal assistance or both to adult children or extended family members- not including school tuition, according to the Wells Fargo/ Gallup Investor and Retirement Optimism Index survey. “It seems to me that today’s landscape is far different than that of a generation ago,” Mary…

The U.S. economy added a modest 136,000 jobs in September, sending the unemployment rate to a nearly 50- year low, a mixed bag that some economists said was more evidence that the country could be headed for a slowdown. “It’s kind of a mixed picture,” said Douglas Kruse, an economist at Rutgers University and a former White House adviser under President Barack Obama.

“Most of us have grown up at the time when we are used to historically exceptionally rapid growth,” in the global economy, said Jaana Remes, a economist and partner at McKinsey Global Institute. “In a slowdown,” said Chun Wang, a portfolio manager at Leuthold Group, “you may get, say, a pay raise, but in a recession, you might lose a job. But it’s the uncertainty over which one is…

The tumble started Tuesday after the Institute of Supply Management’s manufacturing index dropped to its lowest level since 2009, a possible signal that the simmering trade war between the U.S. and China is taking a toll on the sector. “The fact the manufacturing side of the economy in the U.S. and globally is doing badly shouldn’t come as a newsflash to anybody,”…

You don’t have to become a Social Security expert. But you do need to know enough about it to make sure you avoid some of the more common mistakes that would-be beneficiaries and beneficiaries tend to make. What are some of the more common mistakes?