Our Weekend Word

Yesterday first quarter GDP numbers surprised many when they posed a -1.4% mark, indicating that the economy had actually contracted instead of expanding. This was pretty far off from consensus views that the economy would grow by 1.5% that quarter.

Does this mean that we’re going into a recession? Not necessarily.

In the course of our hectic lives, it’s not all that unusual for people to lose track of some things. Sometimes it’s their car keys, other times important dates, and still other times it can be an old stock position or small bank account.

Fortunately for us, our kind state of Pennsylvania has a system to keep track of any wayward assets that may have gotten buried in the file cabinet. Those unattended accounts can fall into the jurisdiction of Unclaimed Property laws.

It is no secret that over the past week Russian businesses have been hit with stiff international sanctions to cripple the Russian economy and dissuade further aggression towards Ukraine. Russia has made threats of its own in response that you have undoubtedly seen on the news.

We want you to know that Commonwealth is taking steps to help us stay protected from possible security threats and any exposure to sanctioned Russian companies.

It’s the day after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Dow Is up almost 2%. Confused? We don’t blame you.

Here is the updated information you should take note of for 2022!

It is 2022 and we all know what that means… tax time!  So we wanted to take the opportunity to detail 2021’s tax documents and their disbursement dates.

All in all, person of the year seems pretty well deserved by Dr. Elon Musk, but such an accolade is a drop in the bucket for him. Like it or not, he is set on changing the world we live in and if some of the crazy things he’s drawing up work out, he’ll do a pretty effective job of that.

Back in the day a good book was the way to transport yourself to another place when you wanted to step out of the mundane daily grind. Then over the years that switched to the movies, and in the past 20 years that has moved on even further to the world of video games. But until this point, the places your favorite medium would teleport you to had one thing in common, they were fake! Made up by you or someone else and what existed in that world, stayed in that world.

Well with the advent of the blockchain, that may be about to change.

Well we finally hit the month where the Federal Reserve couldn’t keep reading from the script and Chairman Jerome Powell let the cat out of the bag on inflation.

Mankind has a long and storied history of letting ego get the best of us. There’s always someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out and they’re smarter than everyone else. But unless you’re Elon Musk that rarely turns out to be true. The latest inductee into the Hall of Hubris in this sense is Zillow. Zillow thought they had created an algorithm that could predict the housing market and were using it to automatically purchase houses that it believed could be resold later for a profit. This didn’t quite work out as planned and led to a massive selloff of Zillow Group’s stock.