It is necessary to remember that investment markets have cycles, much like electricity.

There’s a 50% chance current expectations are correct in assuming the Fed will boost its benchmark rate to about 5%, and a 50% chance that the central bank will have to go to 6%, the JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive officer said in an interview aired Tuesday on Fox Business.

A man named Michelangelo once said “Genius is eternal patience”. The great John Templeton had this to say about gaining knowledge; “If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search”.

Regarding these fundamental causes of systematically increasing costs, the Fed has very little power. Their sole means of control is to raise the cost of capital and credit, which complements the other structural causes by adding an inflationary source. No cycle or trend lasts forever, and the 40-year uptrend has ended. Now a different cycle and trend is developing.

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

Have you ever discovered a leak in your home? The only thing worse than discovering your water supply is not working for some reason, is finding out you have water where it should not be. Your first thought might be to stop the leak, followed quickly with concern about potential damage to your home.

Market cycles have always been a part of our world. Markets move in four phases; understanding how each phase works and how to benefit is the difference between floundering and flourishing.

You probably remember some of the lyrics of the Kenny Rogers hit, “The Gambler”. Kenny was not the first person who recorded the song, but if you asked virtually anyone alive today they would surely credit Kenny Rogers as the person who first brought it to life.

Any pilot knows the importance of knowing what direction wind is blowing. Wind affects flight times, but the landing part is when things can get pretty tricky. Wind gusts do some challenging things when a flight is about to land.

The economy has its own set of “indicators”. As the Federal Reserve attempts to control inflation with a series of swift interest rate hikes, a frequently ignored economic indicator revealed on Friday that the U.S. economy is either already in or headed for a recession.

While Disney is but one company that could cause many people to avoid BlackRock and Vanguard, a careful study of their holdings may cause you to wonder just how your investments are being handled. ESG investing, investing in companies you personally feel go against your moral values, and the huge loss of dollars should all be considered.

Year after year of cheap money was the basis of the issue. For ten years, Wall Street drank cheap money, and it will eventually result in another financial crisis.

We have a very important election in just a few days, is it possible the folks who have been running our country may want to distort the truth about our economic world?

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.