Articles authored by Sonu Varghese

Every quarter the New York Federal Reserve releases its household credit and debt report and we get a flurry of headlines about rising credit card debt, and rising delinquencies. As always with these things, it’s important to maintain some perspective.  One: Household Leverage is Actually Reducing Credit card debt rose 3.9% last quarter (Q4 2024) …

Over the last two years, markets have been able to tune out a pretty dour national mood, with the S&P 500 gaining 25%+ in 2023 and 2024. In fact, real GDP growth clocked in at 2.9% annualized over the last two years, above the pre-pandemic trend. Sentiment was downbeat, but this didn’t really crimp consumer …

The economy created just 143,000 jobs in January, well below expectations for a 175,000 increase, and less than half of the gain in December (which was revised up from 256,000 to 307,000). Over the last three months, job growth has averaged about 237,000 jobs, which is really strong. However, the payroll numbers are messy right …

There’s been a lot of chatter about cutbacks in federal government employment, including “buyout offers” (apparently even at the CIA). The deadline for accepting the buyout is February 6th, and reports suggest anywhere from 20,000-40,000 workers have accepted the offer. Irrespective of how you think about it (good, bad, ugly, or apocalyptic), there’s been some …

On February 1st, President Trump signed executive orders (EO) imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, effective 12:01am February 4th. The orders included: 25% tariffs on Canada, apart from energy imports (tariffed at 10%) 25% tariffs on Mexico 10% tariffs on China These tariffs applied to all goods and would be over and above existing …

The Federal Reserve’s (Fed) January 2025 meeting held no surprises. They maintained policy rates within the 4.25-4.50% range and continued to trim their bond portfolio, as expected. However, their official statement did see a small, but notable, change. They did highlight that the unemployment rate has stabilized at low levels, but inflation remains “somewhat elevated.” …

DeepSeek, a small Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup, shook the AI world last weekend. In short, DeepSeek created an AI model that appears to be as powerful as the existing ones out there. And most importantly, they did it with much less money. DeepSeek’s AI chatbot also soared to the top of the Apple App …

One thing we try to do with our 2025 Outlook: Animal Spirits, which we released last week, is translate our views into portfolio actions, since that’s ultimately what matters. You won’t have to dig far to see how our Carson House Views are woven throughout, making it convenient to access advice and insights that align …

Carson Investment Research released our 2025 Outlook: Animal Spirits on Tuesday. As we highlighted there, we think that economic strengths clearly outweigh areas of weakness in the year ahead, and the opportunities likely have a higher probability of coming to fruition than the threats. We believe that economic momentum, an easing Federal Reserve (Fed), and …

As we look ahead to 2025, we know the scars of high inflation in 2022 and the higher interest rates that came with it are still with us. We’ve seen it in global elections, where incumbents have been rejected across the political spectrum. We’ve seen it in consumer sentiment surveys, which have improved but remain …