Economic Growth vs. Stock Market Returns: China and India

The economic growth of a country and its equity market returns are not directly linked. Conventional wisdom would imply that higher economic growth leads to higher equity market returns and vice versa. But that is not always the case. In fact, the relationship between a country’s GDP growth and its equity market returns is weak …

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Inflation Does Not Necessarily Affect Stock Returns

One of the factors that have been investors’ mind for the past many months has been inflation. Soaring inflation rates led the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates multiple times to tame inflation. Their effort might be bearing fruit soon. The recently release report from BLS showed inflation is cooling. The CPI rate was 3.2% …

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Retirement Ages by Country 2022: Chart

The Finnish Center for Pensions has updated their global retirement age chart for 2022. As in the previous version, the average retirement age in the EU is 65 but is set to increase in 67 in some countries due to higher life expectancy and other factors. Countries such as the Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden and …

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Comparing Corporate Taxes In Europe: Chart

Corporate tax rates vary across the countries in Europe. Some countries have friendly corporate tax regimes while others do not. According to the Tax Foundation, Portugal has the worst corporate taxes while Latvia and Estonia have the best rates. Click to enlarge Source: Comparing Europe’s Tax Systems: Corporate Taxes, Tax Foundation A short excerpt from …

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On the Correlation between Recessions and U.S. Equity Market Performance

Equity markets tend to perform well when the economy is in expansion mode. Similarly when the economy is in recessions markets decline. While in the long-term stocks have gone up that is not the case in the short term as measured by a few months or years. For instance, US equity markets plunged substantially over …

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