This week’s charts focus on key inflation metrics, sentiment, and how equities have started to look past the current crisis.

We’ll keep publishing Charts of the Week every Monday.

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Bank earnings this week offered a timely reminder that the U.S. consumer remains a far more durable force than many narratives suggest. The data produced by the largest financial institutions paints a picture of accelerating growth and improving credit quality, a combination not often seen. Banks are also finding themselves increasingly tied to the AI narrative, and executive...

Consumer sentiment has collapsed irrespective of which metric you look at. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index just crashed to the lowest level in the survey’s history – even below what we saw during the depths of the Great Financial Crisis in 2008-2009, Covid in April-May 2020, and even the stagflationary 1970s. Surely things aren’t that bad? We’re nowhere cl...

Today, we tackle a topic that we don’t write about a lot relative to its importance—municipal bonds.

Why are munis important? A basic principle of investing (and one of the most ignored), Investment outcomes potentially should not be evaluated on returns but on the returns that you keep—returns after taxes. This is where municipal bonds become attractive. Most municipa...

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) continue to gather significant assets, generally at the expense of traditional open-end mutual funds (albeit not completely). In the first quarter alone, ETFs have taken in some $425 billion in net flows, while traditional open-end mutual funds have seen $92 billion in investors assets leave, according to Morningstar. Beneath the surface of contin...