Latest news with #MichaelHartnett
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Working Ohioans will lose health insurance under Medicaid work requirements
(Stock photo via Getty Images) If you know anyone who works in the service industry, you should be very familiar with the problem of hour volatility. When work hours aren't set, worker schedules can vary greatly from week to week and from month to month. This can make a steady stream of income difficult to achieve for service workers. It can also affect eligibility for public benefits. The Ohio Department of Medicaid is currently working with the federal government to implement work requirements for Ohio's 'Medicaid expansion' population–the 760,000 Ohio residents who receive health insurance through the Kasich Administration-era expansion of Medicaid. These work requirements would apply to households at 138% of the federal poverty level and below. Low-income households tend to be headed by people who work in the service industry. My colleague Michael Hartnett estimates that cooks and waiters are the second- and fifth-most common jobs among people in the bottom 20% of income in Ohio. A new analysis by Brookings Institution researchers looks at how the volatility of hours for service workers will impact eligibility for benefits like Medicaid and SNAP. One of the things they look at is the mental model that undergirds the current work requirement system. In 1976, only 26% of low-income employees worked in the service sector. By 2024, that number had risen to 38%. This means that 50 years ago, the contours of an unsteady sector had less of an impact on month-to-month hours than it does today. These researchers used data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to estimate that 64% of service workers worked less than 80 hours in at least one month in 2022. A third (34%) of workers who work an average of 80 hours a month had at least one month that year that they worked less than 80 hours. That means that a monthly work requirement of 80 hours would have disqualified a third of service workers at some point during 2022 from benefits like Medicaid or SNAP. The researchers also find these volatile work hours are largely outside of the control of the workers. According to their analysis, three-quarters of service workers with irregular schedules say their schedules are at the request of their employers, not their own. This is also a high rate among non-service workers, where over 3 in 5 low-income workers with irregular schedules are conforming to employer requirements. So what does this mean? It means tens of thousands of low-income workers in Ohio could lose their health insurance because of work hour volatility out of their control. The labor market has changed a lot over the past fifty years, especially for low-income workers. This has led to less certainty about hours, which makes thresholds like monthly hours not as effective for gauging whether people are participating in the labor force. There are a lot of reasons to be worried about work requirements. The fact that working people will lose health insurance because lack of control over work hours is just another one to add to the list. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's policies risk inflating a new market bubble, BofA says
The Trump administration's policies risk fueling a bubble in parts of the market, BofA said Friday. The firm cites the combination of lower taxes, lower tariffs, and lower rates being pursued by the White House. BofA says the policies could incentivize a pronounced rotation out of bonds into crypto and AI. Bank of America said on Friday that a policy trifecta of lower taxes, lower tariffs, and lower interest rates could fuel a new speculative bubble in markets. The prediction comes as Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill," which would lower taxes among other fiscal measures, sits with the Senate after passing the House of Representatives last week. Meanwhile, Trump continues to pursue trade deals and has ramped up calls for the Fed to lower interest rates. BofA investment strategist Michael Hartnett said that policy could fuel a "deeper" rotation out of bonds and into a handful of areas of the stock market — most notably AI and the high-flying tech names that make up the Magnificent Seven — as well as crypto. Hartnett flagged the relationship between the stock and bond markets as a telltale sign of a bubble forming. An inversion of the classic "bonds master, stocks servant" dynamic has been a mark of past speculative frenzies, with this kind of market behavior seen in 12 of the last 14 bubbles, he noted. The 30-year Treasury touched the highest level since 2008 last week as markets tumbled over fears about the GOP budget bill adding to the US deficit. "Nothing screams bubble more than equities driving nominal/real yields higher," Hartnett wrote. The analysts added that based on past market manias, the Magnificent Seven could see a fresh gain of 30% before the group peaks. The speculation mentioned by Hartnett may already be underway, with so-called low-quality stocks outperforming the broader market over the past few weeks. This dynamic was first pointed out by Bloomberg in a story published Thursday. Illustrating this dynamic, a basket of low-quality stocks compiled by UBS — which counts meme stocks like GameStop and AMC among its components — has handily beaten the S&P 500 since its recent bottom on April 8. Crypto has also seen gains in recent weeks, highlighting the speculative, risk-on mood that's returned as investors work past the tariff chaos that sparked April's big sell-off. Bitcoin is trading at fresh records, hitting an all-time high above $112,000 last week. Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's policies risk inflating a new market bubble, BofA says
The Trump administration's policies risk fueling a bubble in parts of the market, BofA said Friday. The firm cites the combination of lower taxes, lower tariffs, and lower rates being pursued by the White House. BofA says the policies could incentivize a pronounced rotation out of bonds into crypto and AI. Bank of America said on Friday that a policy trifecta of lower taxes, lower tariffs, and lower interest rates could fuel a new speculative bubble in markets. The prediction comes as Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill," which would lower taxes among other fiscal measures, sits with the Senate after passing the House of Representatives last week. Meanwhile, Trump continues to pursue trade deals and has ramped up calls for the Fed to lower interest rates. BofA investment strategist Michael Hartnett said that policy could fuel a "deeper" rotation out of bonds and into a handful of areas of the stock market — most notably AI and the high-flying tech names that make up the Magnificent Seven — as well as crypto. Hartnett flagged the relationship between the stock and bond markets as a telltale sign of a bubble forming. An inversion of the classic "bonds master, stocks servant" dynamic has been a mark of past speculative frenzies, with this kind of market behavior seen in 12 of the last 14 bubbles, he noted. The 30-year Treasury touched the highest level since 2008 last week as markets tumbled over fears about the GOP budget bill adding to the US deficit. "Nothing screams bubble more than equities driving nominal/real yields higher," Hartnett wrote. The analysts added that based on past market manias, the Magnificent Seven could see a fresh gain of 30% before the group peaks. The speculation mentioned by Hartnett may already be underway, with so-called low-quality stocks outperforming the broader market over the past few weeks. This dynamic was first pointed out by Bloomberg in a story published Thursday. Illustrating this dynamic, a basket of low-quality stocks compiled by UBS — which counts meme stocks like GameStop and AMC among its components — has handily beaten the S&P 500 since its recent bottom on April 8. This embedded content is not available in your region. Crypto has also seen gains in recent weeks, highlighting the speculative, risk-on mood that's returned as investors work past the tariff chaos that sparked April's big sell-off. Bitcoin is trading at fresh records, hitting an all-time high above $112,000 last week. Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Bloomberg
7 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
US ‘Bigger Bubble' Shift May Ignite Stocks, Says BofA's Hartnett
The latest turn by the Trump administration to favor tax cuts and lower tariffs has the potential to kick off another speculative frenzy in markets, according to Bank of America Corp. strategists. The flip in US economic strategy to 'we're going to need a bigger bubble' as the solution to the debt problem could incentivize traders to ditch bonds and pile back into artificial intelligence and crypto trades, wrote the team led Michael Hartnett.
CNBC
23-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Bank of America's Hartnett is fighting the flow and making a contrarian play on bonds
After a wild week for Treasury yields, Bank of America's Michael Hartnett is making a big contrarian call, telling clients to bet on battered long-duration U.S. government debt. In a trade he calls "Buy Humiliation, sell Hubris," the firm's chief investment strategist thinks the 30-year bond, yielding over 5% around levels not seen since late-2023 and the dot-com bust before that, is a "cyclical buy opportunity." Writing in his weekly report on where investor cash is moving, Hartnett noted that long bonds are in the "same humiliating place that stock returns were in Feb'09 (-3.4%, then worst rolling return from stocks since 1939) & commodity returns were in Jun'18." In both of those cases, and particularly for equities, they were great entry points that capitalized on downbeat investor sentiment. "Catalysts of [the] 2020s bond bear market [are] now very well-documented in 2025, very priced in, maybe not fully but very priced in," Hartnett wrote. Indeed, investors have soured on bonds based on multiple triggers: worries over tariff-induced inflation as President Donald Trump engages in a global trade war ; the fiscal mess in Washington, particularly following this week's House passage of the "big, beautiful" spending bill that is expected to push government debt and deficits still higher, and an accommodative Federal Reserve that cut interest rates a full percentage point in the latter part of 2024. The 30-year yield is up nearly a full percentage point since the Fed started cutting in September, with the rest of the curve following the path higher. US30Y 1Y line 30 year yield "We say this is perfectly sensible given 'all hat and no cattle' path of US tariff policy (note Trump's approval rating has also recovered its Liberation Day losses), the 'DOGE is out, tax cuts are in' Q2 pivot, investor need to hedge risk 'bubble & boom' policies pursued as politically easiest way to reduce debt as % GDP," Hartnett wrote. However, he said the 30-year bond yield above 5% is "a great entry-point because…'losing the long-end' (and the US dollar) not a winner… > 5% bond yields negative for today's highly 'financialized' US economy relative to Rest-of-World, and bond vigilantes incentivized to punish unambiguously unsustainable path of debt & deficit." Investors actually pushed money to bonds over the past week, with the asset class seeing $25 billion in inflows, according to Bank of America. Investment grade fixed income scored $13.5 billion of fresh cash, the most since the September turning point for yields, while high yield drew $1.9 billion in the past week.
