Smart Investing Newsletter

Most big bank earnings are out now and the news and the guidance did lean on the positive side. A concern was revealed, which was no surprise to us that loan growth was only up 1.1% from a year ago.

Reducing regulations saves companies both time and money and time is always money. Starting in 2025, it is expected that for every new regulation that goes on the books, 10 regulations must be eliminated.

Looking back 30 to 40 years ago when families purchased a home, they did it as a place to raise a family and they weren’t so focused on how much money the house would be worth in the short term.

Before we go into why the good report was bad, let’s talk about some of the data. The expected number of payrolls was 155,000, which came in well above that at 256,000 jobs for the month of December and also increased from November when it was 212,000 jobs.

With technology, shopping has become so easy and set records in 2024 of around $5.3 trillion. While this by itself is a problem as some people are over shopping, it has also invited more fraud than ever before