From the desk of Jim Hiles, please enjoy our 2018 Q1 Quarterly Commentary  

    BREAKING NEWS!  BREAKING NEWS!   Technology, politics, and demographics are changing the business landscape. In the advisory business, gone are the days of brokers, wirehouses, commissions and proprietary products. First Capital Advisors Group has built an advisory business of the future. Our vision is to build a substantial multi-state firm, bound together by its …

The Fed Put and Accommodative Monetary Policy Tools For a number of years, equity investors assumed that the Fed would pull back short-term interest rates whenever equity markets substantially sold off.  Early in this century, investors labeled this action the Greenspan Put.  Since the great recession, the very accommodative monetary policy tools—zero interest rate policies …

  First Poison–Tariffs as a Tool The headlines and much commentary on higher tariffs threatened against China, in our view, glosses over the importance of the underlying issue.  In reality, the higher tariffs represent a tool to deal with protecting U.S. corporate intellectual property and providing greater access to Chinese markets for U.S. corporations. The …

U.S. imports of Chinese goods totaled about $500-600 billion last year or less than 20% of total Chinese exports.  After subtracting out U.S. exports to china, the net Chinese trade surplus with the U.S. totaled nearly $276 billion in 2017 – an all-time high. Tom Friedman’s March 13th column in the New York Times quoted …

The government reported a blowout jobs report this morning which the financial markets should find supportive.  The U.S. economy added about 313,000 jobs—nearly 100,000 more than forecasted.  At the same time, average hour earnings grew 2.6% year- over-year compared to 2.9% last month.  From an equity market perspective, the job numbers support the view that …

Investors reacted negatively to next week’s likely announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum.    The higher tariffs would be applied invoking authority rarely used–national security grounds.  The president tweeted this morning “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country!” Instead of using national security authority, our government typically increases tariffs citing routine reasons …

The  Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) 1/31/18 statement expressed a more confident expectation that inflation would reach its 2% target this year.   Perhaps it’s more confidant statement takes into account the stronger showing in the underlying inflation gauge (UIG) developed by the New York Fed. In developing this broader inflation gauge, the NY Fed assumed …