This week’s public-service announcement: your tax return and/or tax payment and/or extension paperwork are due next Wednesday, April 15th. Remember that the post office no longer guarantees a postmark on the day you drop off your mail. You can go inside the post office and get a postmark, or file electronically. If you need anything from Diastole, PLEASE call us. We are happy to help.
In non-tax news: the American/Israeli war against Iran continues, along with its pressure on oil and gas prices. The president issued another ultimatum, declaring that if the Strait of Hormuz is not open tomorrow, he will escalate the bombing. Pakistan and Turkey drafted a cease-fire agreement that calls for the Strait to reopen, but Iran has already rejected the terms, saying it wants an end to the war.
Oil from the United States is generally referred to as West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTI), while the international benchmark is Brent Crude. One week ago, WTI oil cost $102.88 per barrel. Today it costs $110.34. That price is for a futures contract. If you actually want to buy a barrel of oil today and take it home with you, the price is higher.
Gas prices are also higher, of course. On February 27th, the national average for a gallon of gas stood at $2.98 – just one day before the war in Iran started. Today that average is more than $4.10 per gallon. The influence of oil and gas prices on inflation is relentless and puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to HIKE interest rates. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said that energy disruptions tend to be short-lived, but the Fed can’t be patient forever in the face of years of elevated inflation. The next Fed Open-Market Committee meeting will occur on April 28-29. And on this coming Friday, we will receive a new Consumer Price Index (CPI) reading. Watch this space!
Stocks, which started the year strong, are down for the year-to-date, but were actually up last week on the hopes that the war would be ending soon. That was the first week of gains in the last six weeks. I am sorry that my sentence structure reflects the complexity of the situation. I should do better.
Meanwhile, bond prices are slipping, causing yields to rise. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions. Mortgage rates have also risen for the fifth-straight week.
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX includes his xAI lab and X social-media service. It has just filed for an initial public offering (IPO) with a target company valuation of more than $2 trillion (up from $1.75 trillion). The actual stock sale for SpaceX’s IPO is expected to hit $75 billion. Once SpaceX is partially held in the public’s portfolios, it will have to open its previously confidential books. That will be interesting. And the world’s richest man will get richer.
The March jobs report was released on Friday and showed 178,000 net new jobs created – versus 59,000 which were expected. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.3%. The February jobs report, which had shown a loss of 92,000 was revised downward by an additional loss of 41,000 jobs. Job gains for March were largely in the healthcare and social assistance sectors, which benefit from our aging baby boomer population.
Deja vu? Thieves forced open the entrance door of an art museum in Parma, Italy and stole paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse worth millions of euros. The theft took less than three minutes. Now the canny art thieves can move on to another heist. It was just about six months ago that the shocking Louvre robbery took place.
For the week ending on April 3rd, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 46,504, the Standard and Poor’s 500 closed at 6,582, and the Nasdaq Composite Index closed at 21,879. The yield on the ten-year Treasury Note finished at 4.331%. U.S. (WTI) crude oil cost $110.34 per barrel, while brent crude cost $108.60 per barrel. N.Y. gold was bid at $4,690 per ounce. One Euro was worth $1.16.
Elizabeth E. Cook
Partner, Diastole Wealth Management
News and information presented here was gathered from sources believed, but not guaranteed, to be reliable, including (but not limited to) Morning Brew, Barron’s, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Bloomberg and Bloomberg Business Week, Yahoo Finance, Business insider, Axios, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Bureau of Labor Statistics, The AP, Reuters, The Hustle, and the Independent. If you have questions, please call us at 203.458.5220, or email me, Liz Cook, at ecook@dwinvest.com. Thank you!
An adult weighing 165 pounds would have to eat 7,084 Hershey’s Kisses to die from chocolate. Despite my concerns about how this fact was determined, I am confident that I can stick to a limit of 7,083 Kisses. Just.