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 We stopped the close reading of what the financial gurus are saying. We get it: No one really knows where the US whatevers, especially the stock market, are going. As for the financial projections, including another great depression, they are jaw-jawing about on Main Street, we tune out. We know that they don't know. Last night before we went to sleep we checked Dow futures. They were up. This morning the actual Dow is up.  Dow Jones Industrial Average Index Index: DJI Compare 49,655.58 USD ▲  +213.02 (+0.43%) today April 21, 9:31 AM EDT  ·  Market Open But it would be naive to connect any dots in an upbeat way. Those I care about have been shuttering their small businesses. Too many of those I coach have to do a memory-erase: letting go of how it had been to have a very good job with tons of perks.  What I bear witness to is so much pain.

  Pre-2026: The Haves are the wealthy.  The brutal factors in the current labor market -AI, cost-efficiency, offshoring, plus inflation - have blown that up. Emerging now is a new version of the Haves. They're the ones who can pay their bills on-time and have a reserve of funds in their checking account.  In contrast, are the Have-Nots. Essentially they consist of the 72% of adults in America who are living in financial anxiety and 48% of those have been paying their bills late.  Among the Have-Nots, recently personal bankruptcies have increased 11% . This new category in socioeconomics makes the concept of "middle class" irrelevant.  Smirk. Remember it used to be considered an attribute of being middle class to purchase only brands, own a house and speak standard English.  Well, store private labels are being purchased and served to guests without shame. Don't expect Lay's and Doritos at my Super Bowl party. The chips will be Walmart's Great Value. In more...

  "Wow. You're getting 30 hours a week." I assumed I was congratulating this 72-year-old woman on having the ability to land so much work.  She was having none of it. "I get $13 an hour. And am on my feet." Her regret was not investing. Instead she had paid for the children's education and weddings. Well, even if she had invested she might not have been better off. At least not emotionally. Look what we Boomers knew would happen with the Strait of Hormuz closed again and which did: FUTURES IND Close Future Change 49,447.43 49,165 -476 FAIR VALUE FUTURES (-7.57) FV Close Future Impl Open 49,633.43 49,165 -468.43 Last updated: Sun Apr 19 2026 | 7:43 PM EDT

There used to be so much stigma about losing a job, even because of a layoff, that the unemployed: Created rosy spins about how well the job search was going Maintained an overall low profile, taking survival jobs off-the-radar, and Knew that media was not their friend.  Not so much anymore.  A common MO has been to loop into doom-and-gloom, sharing (oversharing) the story of chronic unemployment with the media. That strategy is high-risk, both for the jobless and for the media outlet publishing what is turning out in this AI, cost-efficiency, offshoring low-hire era the "same old." Typical in BusinessInsider is the sharing by former UX designer Christopher Santoso who has been without a full-time job since May 2025. What's most soul-wearing to him is being ghosted when applying. So? Sure, presenting himself in the media can get the attention of employers. That means that such a strategy can be high-reward. I wish that be the outcome for Santoso. However, more probable i...

At 6 PM ET we can start checking the Dow futures. Unless there is a fix for the now-closed-again Strait of Hormuz  the gains we've made in our nest eggs in the past few days could go poof. And worse.  Sure, we Boomers are a fragmented lot. Who we are depends on how we experienced the economy. The oldest like myself entered into an era of abundance. Younger Boomers not so much so. But one thing we currently have in common is our necessary preoccupation with money. We could make it into our 90s. Through Facebook I'm encountering members of my class of 1967. So far only one who I know of has passed on. What we didn't expect is that here we still would be at age 80. The angst is if we will be able to keep paying the bills for this peculiar expansion of longevity. Policymakers, please fix the Hormuz issues. 

Agreed, currently capitalism is downright toxic. Predictably there would be a "hero" like Luigi Mangione who allegedly took action against it. That alleged offing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson resonated. Who doesn't live in high angst about a medical bill wiping them out. Most personal bankruptcies happen that way.  Now we have Daniel Moreno-Gama, another young man with a cause we can certainly identify with. As The Wall Street Journal documents: " ... Texas college student named Daniel Moreno-Gama was  charged with attempted murder  and arson as part of an alleged attack on OpenAI chief executive Altman’s home ... He was carrying an anti-AI manifesto ..." Moreno-Gama could also take on the aura of being exactly on the side of right. For that, he has been willing to sacrifice his own future. To more and more, those in the AI box are the bad guys.   Among the tipping points about this technology, from being regarded with awe to terror that the end is n...

  Dow Jones 30 Industrial Index  , DJIA 49,238.35 +659.63 +1.36%

SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh grew up in a household with parents who were professionals. SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor didn't. Neither did I. So? This issue of a privileged background - or membership in the "lucky sperm club" - is getting old. Essentially in America we're accepting that life isn't fair. From conception some have an edge. The joke is: Choose your parents wisely.  Proof that Radical Acceptance is the current mindset is that Sotomayor had to back down from attacking Kavanaugh for how differently he grew up from her and from so many immigrants and those who get paid by the hour. That mouth-full didn't go over well. Politico reports: " ... Sonia Sotomayor apologized Wednesday for suggesting that Justice Brett Kavanaugh had a sheltered upbringing that made him insensitive to day laborers being targeted by the Trump administration for immigration enforcement." She hadn't mentioned her SCOTUS colleague by name but she didn't have...

You bet, the generations which followed Boomers certainly have resentments. They size up that Boomers got a better deal than they did. A much better one. Everything from cheap higher education to secure corporate jobs (that is, at least until Jack Welch, et al., sent middle managers into the cold in middle age). Those hostilities have become raw. Therefore, Boomers have a ready-made excuse to look away from the suffering of younger generations. It's so heavy. No help is on the way for youth. They could be the worse off generation since The Great Depression.  What Boomers are looking at is their own money. Will they have the funds to continue with a lifestyle or to make it until they die? Inflation is blowing up the years of planning. And for them too help isn't on the way.  Social Security payments can be reduced in six years. Medicare is uncertain. Most have already crossed the line from very good health to scary medical conditions. How much in addition to Medicare/Medicare s...

During the next Super Bowl party, guests might not turn up their nose that I'm not serving the big brands. That's even though Pepsi, after losing customers through raising prices, got back some by lowering them. Instead for the annual entertainment hoopla of the Super Bowl, there will be the generics developed by the big boxes such as Walmart. I'll put them out there on the table, without apology. Just like AI is getting better and better so are the private labels like Great Value. I honestly can't taste the difference between Pepsi diet cola and Sam's. Recently Walmart has redesigned the look.  That's a worthwhile investment since private label has surged to a $330 billion industry. This isn't new. Way back in 2024, it was documented that there was a flight from big brands to private label.  The tipping point was price in an era of inflation.  The old-line obstacle to serving generic food items had been the socioeconomic "shame." You wouldn't...

Losing a job is very different now. America is no stranger to extreme economic downturns, mergers and acquisitions, the introduction of new technologies and reductions of corporate layers. Who among us hasn't lost a good job because of those developments.  One major shift, though, is this: Instead of the angst about maintaining your lifestyle during the search and with what you find, it's the probability of running out money. Almost 70% of the jobless drain their savings, with 44% missing regular payments such as rent. BusinessInsider  features those who are heading toward that brutal reality.  Essentially they're chasing after comparable jobs and not finding them. That's a key error of judgment, pushing them into being without income. Severance and unemployment end. Retirement funds get drained.  They can no longer assume they can pursue a linear path in earning a living. They're operating against the current headwinds of a low hiring rate, whole sectors such ...

  Dow Futures 48,763.00 Change + 8.00   0.02%  

  Nice try. The Wall Street Journal starts out its article on us Boomers with this: "The first of the youth-obsessed baby boomers turn 80 this year, including President Trump, and they want to shake up old age." That all-knowing tone from a respected legacy publication is supposed to trigger readers nodding their heads in agreement: Ah, that's what the Boomers are about. But, it isn't. Actually our generation is increasingly diverse in what we are about. Given so many changes, ranging from AI to a sustained roller-coaster investment scene, I, for one, am struggling to catch up to who I'm becoming. Pieces of that don't include, at least not for now, wanting to "shake up old age."  Primarily I'm focused on balancing not outliving my money with the peril of being too frugal and missing opportunities such as traveling abroad for enjoying life. Several years ago I phased out being an influencer. With the exception of protecting Social Security and Med...

The emerging big story about recent college graduates isn't their unemployment or underemployment. It's their push-back through unionizing. That's being called the "new labor movement."  As Noam Sheiber depicts it in "Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College Working Class" this development has all the passion, determination and sacrifice of the 1930s auto workers campaigns to establish a fair contract between management and labor. Yes, allegedly labor activists are losing jobs because of their organizing. Featured in "Mutiny" is the history of Apple retail. That brick and mortar concept started off with a great deal for young workers. Training, a sense of purpose and pride in the brand characterized the work experience. But much of that eroded. In response was the campaign at the Towson Mall location in Maryland for representation by a union. Yahoo Finance reports: "Workers at the Towson location voted to join the International Assoc...

  Dow Futures 47,662.00 Change - 467.00   0.97%  

In the Spring edition of Vanity Fair , Joe Hagen nails it in his article on AI. He reports: "Nobody really knows how to build guardrails that work." So, here we are with breaking news that business and government leaders are meeting to discuss the implications of Anthropic's Mythos. They know that no one knows. As Anthropic itself describes Mythos, which hasn't been released (with exceptions): " ... is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so." The user could be a madman. Or an alleged non-truthteller like OpenAI's Sam Altman, as positioned and packaged in The New Yorker.   Therefore, the end could be near. Some estimates are within a few years. Sure, Anthropic can hold back its Mythos. But others, putting profit ahead of safety, could develop their own version. A bad actor user could hack into the systems which could destroy life on...

  As we age, income from work tends to go down. So, even those of us Boomers who are still out there in the labor market or operating our own businesses are beyond our peak earnings years. We do depend on Social Security to get us through.  So, it helps de-escalate our rising financial angst in these inflationary times to hear estimates about where our Social Security COLA could be for 2027. CNBC  reports: "The cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, could be 3.2% in 2027 due to sharply rising gasoline prices ..." Of course, some of that could be reduced if the monthly Medicare deduction increases yet again. Amid all the gloom talk we Boomers still get it that we may be the last lucky gen in America. Despite severe recessions and stock market crashes we had the best of economic times, along with cheap higher education and degrees which were marketable. My first house outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania cost about $30K. It was a two-family so I rented out half.  Currently ma...

COVID brought remote learning to higher education. And with it the beginning of upheaval in the traditional bonding between students and colleges/universities. That centuries-old relationship was captured in the notion of the institution you graduated from as your "alma mater." The concept means "nourishing mother." Instead of a nourishing mother during COVID, some students experienced their educational institution as financial predator. They banded together in class action lawsuits to be refunded tuition and fees that had been paid for in-person instruction.  As a result, now here we are as Bloomberg Law observes: "The student class-action trend appears here to stay and may indicate a major shift in the student-university relationship." This time around the litigation focuses on amounts not spent on meal plans. Litigants want those funds back. They contend not refunding violates state consumer laws as in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey about unspent ...

From Main Street to social/professional networks the meme has shifted radically. In job search and promotion possibilities it used to be: Be persistent. Currently, as this Reddit posting hammers, it's: Get out.  In my intuitive coaching/tarot reading, essentially I am sizing up clients' employment situations the same way. That is, assessing: If they should ditch searching for a job in a certain field or even holding on amid so much job insecurity where they are employed.  And, when. Overall, what I have observed is that most knowledge workers wait too long to throw in the towel. What is operating is magical thinking that somehow their talent, proven skills and hustle will "save" them. One policy analyst clung to that illusion for two years of joblessness before they came to me for guidance.  As the deluded hang on their financial reserve collapses, along with their self-confidence and relationships with loved ones. The latter simply tire of what could be labeled ...

  For too many of us former social change agents, our money is primarily out of control. That includes not only the value of our investments. It's also about the predicted return of high inflation and rising interest rates. Will we turn into our frightened parents? They never unwound after The Great Depression. Tonight we will sleep, though. The Dow roared back today. Futures aren't doing a disaster: Dow Futures 48,056.00 Change - 88.00   0.18%  

  We Boomers don't have the time to recover from a crash. In addition, our Social Security monthly payment could get reduced in six years. So, this is sweet. But not to be trusted. Dow Jones Industrial Average INDEXDJX: .DJI 47,958.41 +1,373.95  (2.95%) today Apr 8, 9:38 AM EDT  •  Disclaimer

  It was a different time. Freudianism was having a heyday in the United States. If you were sophisticated you were in psychoanalysis. Cartoons in The New Yorker mocked how we discussed what our analysts said at cocktail parties. And, of course we put everyone else on the couch.  That included Richard Nixon and all the president's men. The psychobabble ranged from Nixon's insecurity to paranoia to grandiose personality. Overall, Watergate was sized up in the psychological terms of blind ambition. Not so, for the current Epstein files scandal. Those identified as Friends of Jeffrey are described in system concepts.  The close relationship of Bard president Leon Botstein and financial founder Leon Black with the monster is summed as how networking operates in the top tiers of society. There's no probing of their ID, Ego and Super Ego a la Freudianism.  Paul, Weiss partner Brad Karp is viewed from the cautionary perspective of getting too close to a client.  Techie...

  Dow Futures 47,729.00 Change + 917.00   1.96%   UPDATE: Market Summary  >  E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index Futures 47,824.00  USD +1,012.00  (2.16%) today Apr 7, 10:46 PM CDT  •  Disclaimer

"Remember the poem 'If—' by Rudyard Kipling that begins 'If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs'? We will stay true to this. We must deal with the world we have — and strive for the one we want." Essentially that quote captures the tone and the content of JP Morgan Chase's Annual Letter , as created by its leader Jamie Morgan. It's a mashup of aspirational poetry and pragmatism. That operates on a platform of optimism about the resilience of the US economy. The bullishness is rooted in the twin realities that America has lasted 250 years and JP Morgan Chase has been around since 1799. The major risks to the economy include: Global conflicts Sustained inflation Private markets unrest Poor banking regulations. Simultaneously Dimon is bullish on AI. He doesn't see a bubble. The ambiguity is about which players will be the winners and which the losers. Already, as many of us know, there have been dire predictions. For example  O...