After a pullback in July, the market is once again climbing, cautiously, as it absorbs Powell’s Wyoming speech, in which he left the door open to one more rate increase this year, though he was careful not to offer anything definitive. (It was a bit reminiscent of Alan Greenspan, who confessed that he lived in fear of anyone actually understanding what he had said about the Fed’s near-future plans). As a result of Powell’s will-he-or-won’t-he? stance, the market waffles cautiously upward at the moment. The Fed will continue to study the numbers, most of which indicate slowing inflation, and make a decision based on their best-informed guesses about the economy’s longer-term trajectory. Meanwhile the Board of Managers continues to watch, tweak where necessary, and keep the needs of shareholders uppermost in mind.

The EEF was in the top 25% of the universe of 600 balanced funds for all periods except 10 years where we were in the 26th percentile.  In all cases we were better than our stated goal for the Fund, which is to remain, over rolling three-year periods, in the top 50% of the balance fund universe. Additionally, an analysis of distributions to parishes – assuming distributions at the CRR rate based on a three-year rolling asset base – showed that even with the sharp pullback in 2022, parishes did not see their distributions decline.