I hope your summer is off to a good start and you are enjoying the much-awaited return to normalcy. Please take time to read through this month’s edition of our newsletter to keep up to date with our thoughts about the market and happenings around the office.
Although season is winding down, we continue to be active with client meetings. This summer, we are welcoming three interns and two new hires, one of which is a previous intern. We are planning several summer seminars in our Moran Center for Financial Education. You can find an upcoming schedule on page 5 of this newsletter. We hope to see you there if you are in town and we are excited to offer more year-round events for our clients.
In my conversations with clients this month, there was one topic that seemed to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind — inflation. And with good reason: there are signs that inflation is around the corner, but the question remains when, and how high? Throughout May and June, fiscal stimulus talks continued to be in focus, but following the narrative from the Fed, the market seems to believe that current inflationary pressures should be transitory. In June, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s comments emphasized there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding inflationary data, but that the Fed expects to raise the federal funds rate from zero to 0.6% by 2023. He also indicated that the Fed expects the high inflation readings will start to abate as we head into the latter half of this year. We continue to expect that over the short-to-medium term we could continue to see strong equity markets. Heading into the latter half of 2022 and into 2023, we believe that we could see more turmoil in the equity markets resulting from higher interest rates, increased inflation and a general slowdown of the economy.
As always, please let us know if you have any questions or if we can be helpful in any way. It is our pleasure and privilege to serve you, and we appreciate the trust that you have placed in us.
MONTHLY MARKET COMMENTARY
Many of us opt to “Buy American” as a mark of patriotism, and this mentality also applies to the investment world. Essentially, investors have the tendency to overinvest in stocks from their home country as domestic companies are more recognizable. Investing in international equities, on the other hand, is often overlooked, but we believe it is critical to a well-balanced approach to investing. As economies globally rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic, there may be many opportunities that lie outside of our bias to invest domestically. We believe the catalysts for success in international investing are apparent: global economic improvements, a weaker U.S. dollar and attractive valuations across global equities. Let’s take a brief look at some opportunities and risks associated with international investing…
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