Our clients often ask us about real estate, and what we think about buying or selling a primary residence, a vacation home, or an investment property. This is hardly surprising—for many of our clients, their family home is by far their largest asset. What’s more, most of our clients live in either the Seattle or San Francisco areas, both of which have experienced extraordinary real estate appreciation in recent…
Congress and the President recently passed the biggest tax reform in over 30 years. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 aims to make the United States corporate tax rate more competitive and therefore increase corporate investment domestically. The bill also provides for individual tax breaks beginning in 2018, that will expire at the end of 2025. What Does This Mean For My Portfolio? Corporations will now be taxed…
For decades, it has been conventional wisdom in American business that the one proper objective of corporate managers is to increase the company’s share price. That is the principal behind stock options, which tie compensation to share price. Other considerations, such as worker satisfaction, civic engagement, or environmental impact, have been perceived as irrelevant, except to the extent that they bear on profitability, and thus on share price. The…
Every now and again, we get questions from clients that we think we should share. In this post, we respond to the question in the subject line: why is the dollar in a free fall against the euro and the pound? To be sure, the US dollar is currently not in a “free-fall”. However, it is fair to ask what is behind last years drop in value of the US…
Last month, we wrote about the sometimes misleading terminology used to describe relative currency values: the “strong” and “weak” dollar. Another example of labels that can mislead us about economic issues is one that has been in the news of late: the so-called “trade deficit.” The United States runs a trade deficit with another country when it imports more from that country than it exports to it. The opposite…
Economics is a numerical discipline. Economists count things, measure their value, calculate ratios between those values, and project how the counts and values will change over time. But to communicate economic ideas, we rely largely on language. And for the most part, language is very useful for this purpose, because language is a powerful tool. Sometimes, however, language’s very power can overwhelm the concepts it is supposed to communicate,…
The United States of America always pays its debts. Since the Revolutionary War, the U.S. government has been borrowing money to fund its operations, and it has never failed to make good on its obligations. According to the award-winning financial history, This Time Is Different, no other major power can make that claim. The founding father of this legacy is Alexander Hamilton, who as Secretary of the Treasury argued…
The 2016 U.S. election was among the most colorful and dramatic in our history. While it remains to be seen how consequential it will be, one potential impact of particular interest to us at Bear Mountain Capital is the fate of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Dodd-Frank was a complex legislative package enacted with the broad goal of preventing a repeat of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Shortly after taking office,…
Yesterday, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. While a close vote was highly anticipated, the markets had discounted the possibility of a “Brexit” the last several days by pushing the markets upward. After the final results came out last night, the markets had to reverse course. The “Leave” group had voted 51.9% in favor of leaving the union. Unsurprisingly, the result was a big sell-off today across…
How do you solve a problem like commodities? Sound of Music, anyone? Well, if you are not a fan of musicals, that is okay. Chances are at this point in the market cycle, you are probably not a fan of commodities, either. Commodity prices are clearly a hot-topic right now and not in a good way. As anyone who owns commodities knows, returns for the asset class have been more than frustrating the…
