Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be”. The same could be said for your retirement assets if you fail to act decisively. As I have written for some time, this is not a time to “hope for the best”. It is time to be safe.

Investing in the same things, no matter the market cycle, can be very costly. You may have invested in your own company stock for years, but that may not be smart during this market cycle. To prove this point, all one has to do is go to Yahoo Finance and have a look at the chart which shows actual history.

The short version of what follows is things are looking even worse now, and on multiple fronts. And unlike 2007-2008, where the officialdom actually was monitoring the US (and other markets) housing bubble and derivatives implosion and engaging in (not adequate) responses, here top financial and monetary authorities are missing in action as far as these obvious risks are concerned.

Fed officials on Thursday reiterated calls for aggressive policy to combat stubbornly high inflation—fueling expectations for bigger rate hikes amid a stock-market selloff that’s seen major indexes hit new lows for the year—and some analysts project that the losses could only deepen.

Since 2008, the Fed has inflated asset prices with interest-rate repression and QE, huge amounts of QE. It caused the greatest asset bubble ever – the Everything Bubble.

FedEx shocked Wall Street on Thursday by scrapping its earnings forecast for its current fiscal year, which it had issued less than three months ago.

“So what we have to do is flatten the curve and avoid the peak demands,” Leyen added. “We will propose a mandatory target for reducing electricity use at peak hours. And we will work very closely with the member states to achieve this.”

“We are in a bubble, but it is unlike any other.” The excessive bubbles of history took a great economic situation and extrapolated it into the future, based on an assumption that today’s perfect conditions will continue.

Two open jobs for about each person looking. It’s good to have open jobs, no question about that. But the problem right now is that businesses are frustrated to the max that they can’t find workers. We still have so many workers sitting on the sidelines right now. If you look at the labor participation rate numbers, it’s lower today than it was before the pandemic started.

“We are moving our policy stance purposefully to a level that will be sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2 percent,” Powell said. “Restoring price stability will likely require maintaining a restrictive policy stance for some time. The historical record cautions strongly against prematurely loosening policy”.

A good question would be, why would anyone decide to invest in Compass? Further, if some entity did invest in such a company, it would be reasonable to question how that entity did their due diligence, and how their investment policy was designed.

The housing market has long been a key component of the American economy. Real estate is a significant domestic source of income and employs many Americans working in the construction industry.

Having studied government reports for a couple of generations, I think it wise to be a little dubious when a rosy picture is being painted about anything when an important election is just around the corner.

Since the Fed’s founding in 1913, the US dollar has lost 97 percent of its purchasing power. Furthermore, Fed policies helped engineer the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008–09

Now, the Fed is promising endless rate hikes and $1T of balance sheet reduction onto a planet with emerging market and Euro-zone credit markets in flames.

"Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States" — Sen. Barry Goldwater

Markets have been manipulated by the Federal Reserve for years through cheap money, and the buying assets thereby causing asset prices to rise at a rate not supportable by value.

BlackRock said in a May report outlining its "firm wide" ESG initiatives that it aims to "engage with investee companies on ESG problems to increase long-term value." In fact, Fink stated in 2017 that he wanted to shift corporate America's course toward progressive outcomes.