Author: smarttalksucce

The U.S. budget deficit was sliced in half for fiscal 2022, the biggest drop in history following two years of huge Covid-related spending.

Though still large in historical terms, the budget shortfall declined to $1.375 trillion, compared to the 2021 deficit of $2.776 trillion.

The decline would have been steeper had it not been for the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program. Education spending totaled $639.4 billion for the fiscal year, $408 billion higher than estimated.

The 2022 fiscal year saw $4.896 trillion in revenue against $6.272 trillion in outlays. The outlays number represented about a $550 billion decline in spending but an $850 billion increase in revenue. The revenue total is by far the highest ever for the U.S. government.

Deficits in the previous two years soared as Congress shelled out massive sums to combat the pandemic.

The shortfall hit a record $3.13 trillion in 2020 due to more than $5 trillion in CARES Act spending and other outlays. In 2019, the deficit was $983.6 billion. Prior to 2020, the highest deficit ever was $1.41 trillion in 2009 as the financial crisis came to a close. The U.S. briefly ran a surplus from 1998 to 2001.

In fiscal 2021, legislators passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion spending package that the White House said helped get the nation through a severe health and economic crisis, but which critics say was unnecessary and helped fuel the highest inflation rate in more than 40 years.

President Joe Biden, however, placed the deficit blame on Republicans for approving the 2017 tax cut bill.

“The federal deficit went up every single year in the Trump administration — every single year he was president,” he said. “It went up before the pandemic. It went up during the pandemic. It went up every single year on his watch, Republican’s watch.”

Biden called the GOP fiscal approach “mega-MAGA trickle down” that he defined as “the kind of policies that have failed the country before and it’ll fail it again.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the budget statement released Friday “provides further evidence of our historic economic recovery, driven by our vaccination effort and the American Rescue Plan.”

Yellen added that the results also showed Biden’s “commitment to strengthening our nation’s fiscal health.”

Earlier this year, the White House pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act aimed at a variety of areas including reducing medical costs, boosting clean energy and reforming the tax code. However, inflation has continued to climb, and administration officials have stressed that the Federal Reserve’s primary role in fighting price increases is through interest rate hikes.

—CNBC’s Emma Kinery contributed reporting.

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk thinks the global economic decline could last for another year and a half.

In a Twitter exchange early Friday morning Eastern time, the mercurial electric car executive and world’s richest man said a recession could continue “until spring of ’24.”

The remarks came in response to a tweet from Shibetoshi Nakamoto, the online name for Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who noted that current coronavirus numbers “are actually pretty low. i [sic] guess all we have to worry about now is the impending global recession and nuclear apocalypse.”

“It sure would be nice to have one year without a horrible global event,” Musk replied.

Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, a Twitter account with nearly 600,000 followers, then asked Musk how long he thought the recession would last, to which he replied, “Just guessing, but probably until spring of ’24.”

Global GDP grew 6% in 2021 but is expected to decelerate to 3.2% this year and 2.7% in 2023, according to the International Monetary Fund. That would mark the weakest pace of growth since 2001 outside of the financial crisis in 2008 and the brief plunge in the early days of the Covid pandemic. The Federal Reserve projects GDP in the U.S. to grow just 0.2% this year and 1.2% in 2023.

Musk becomes the latest corporate titan to express reservations about the economy.

In a tweet Wednesday, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said it’s time to “batten down the hatches” in preparation for rough economic waters ahead. That tweet accompanied a video of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who said in a CNBC interview that he thinks there’s a “good chance” of a recession in the U.S.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon also has been warning of economic turmoil ahead.

Musk’s comment also came amid a rough week for Tesla stock as the automaker missed revenue estimates and cautioned about a potential delivery shortfall this year.

During the analyst call, Musk expressed more confidence in the U.S. economy than other parts of the world. He also noted the impact that interest rate increases are having on the economy.

“The U.S. actually is in — North America’s in pretty good health,” he said. “A little bit of that is raising interest rates more than they should, but I think they’ll eventually realize that and bring back down, I think.”

However, he said China is in “quite a burst of a recession of sorts” driven by the real estate market, while Europe “has a recession of sorts, driven by energy.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated past GDP growth.

Even though Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S., they’re underrepresented across many industries, including finance, which can have long-term effects on the ability to grow wealth.

A group of Latino-led and focused venture capital firms is looking to change that.

There are more than 62 million Hispanic or Latino people in the U.S., according to the 2020 Census. That’s nearly 19% of the total population, second only to non-Hispanic whites. They also represent one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors: In 2019, the total economic output of the group was $2.7 trillion, up from $1.7 trillion in 2010, according to a report from the Latino Donor Collaborative.

But in 2021, Latinos made up only 4% of large U.S. companies’ most senior executives, per a survey from the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility. And a separate study in 2019 by the CFA Institute found that only 8% of workers in investment management firms were Latino compared to 9% Asian, 5% Black and 84% white.

Similarly, only 2% of venture capital professionals and partner-level professionals at institutional firms are Latino, a study from LatinxVC discovered.

“We’re trying to increase [Latino] venture capitalists within established venture organizations,” said Mariela Salas, the executive director of LatinxVC. “We’re also trying to retain those Latinos that are in institutional and smaller firms.”

Latinos also are less likely to have access to investing. Latino household wealth lags that of white counterparts, and only 26% of Hispanic households have access to an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, compared to 37% of Black households and half of white ones, the Economic Policy Institute found.  

Lack of access to capital markets makes it harder for Latinos to build meaningful wealth. It also means they’re underrepresented as shareholders of companies if they aren’t holding stocks and that they’re not lending a proportional voice to investing decisions.

“We should be mindful of the connection of finance and the capital markets to the broader economy,” said Rodrigo Garcia, global chief financial officer of Talipot Holdings, an investment management group. “It’s always been a critical piece that we have representation in asset management, in the people who are making decisions on the purchases of stocks, bonds, venture capital private equity and more.”

There are several Latino-focused venture capital firms that are working on at least one piece of the puzzle: investing in their communities.

One of those firms is the Boston Impact Initiative, which just launched a $20 million fund focused on investing in entrepreneurs of color.

“We take the earliest risk, we’re funding the teeny-tiny startups that hopefully one day will grow into those companies that become publicly traded and become available in the retail finance sector,” said Betty Francisco, CEO of the Boston Impact Initiative. Those businesses include Synergy Contracting, a women-owned construction company, and Roundhead Brewing, the first Latino-owned craft brewery in Massachusetts.

Another group, Mendoza Ventures, was started in 2016 to address the lack of both women and Latinos writing checks to fund new companies. The Boston-based firm run by Adrian Mendoza has raised $10 million across two funds.

“We give the opportunity to first-time accredited investors, people of color and women to get access to venture capital,” Mendoza said. Accredited investors are individuals or entities that meet specific earned income, net worth or asset thresholds in order to invest in sophisticated or complex securities.

“The majority of wealth in America comes from [mergers and acquisitions] and that comes through venture capital and private equity, so why not be able to diversify on the other end?” Mendoza added.

To be sure, there has been some progress in the financial industry. In 2021, the number of Latino certified financial planners rose by 15% from the prior year. Still, of the overall class of professionals who passed the exam that year, only 2.7% identified as Latino.

Those in the industry see that there’s a benefit to having more people with diverse experiences in all areas of finance.

“You cannot replicate anyone’s lived experience,” said Marcela Pinilla, director of sustainable investing at Zevin Asset Management. She added that as a Latina in finance, she wants to bring more people of color into the industry.

From the perspective of the retail investors themselves, one of the most powerful things they can do is look at what they’re investing in and ask how many of those dollars are going to Latino fund managers, Latino-led funds or even companies with Hispanic leadership.

“I think just the simple question of ‘who is managing my money?'” is important, said Mendoza.