Chinese stocks rose and the yen headed for a second weekly decline against the dollar on speculation governments will step up stimulus to bolster their economies. Precious metals advanced with oil. The Shanghai Composite Index jumped 1.2 percent to 3,110.77 at 12:41 p.m. in Tokyo, after surging the most in three weeks yesterday. Standard & Poor’s…
I can see why Lei Jun doesn’t want to be called the Steve Jobs of China. If you look at his history, he’s more like a quasi-Bill Gates with a hint of Jeff Bezos, with Marc Andreesen tendencies, and only a soupçon of Steve Jobs. Look at his history: 1992 to 2007: he joined as…
In his last email of the Year Michael Pettis takes stock of the current state of China’s rebalancing. It’s an 18 page PDF, with no online link. Taking Stock of China’s Transition by Michael Pettis Special points to highlight in this issue: While policymakers almost certainly understand that the interest rate cuts announced by…
The EUR/USD pair rose during the course of the day on Wednesday, but as you can see struggled above the 1.22 handle, and ended up falling to form a shooting star. The shooting star of course suggests that the sellers are going to come back in and push this market lower. The Euro has been struggling for…
The end of rising wages = the end of mass affluence: we just enjoyed the Last Christmas in America (TLCIA). As unemployment topped 10%, the January 1975 cover of Ramparts magazine blared: The End of Affluence: The Last Christmas in America. (TLCIA) The government responded to the high unemployment, rampant inflation and rising budget deficits by manipulating data to…
Econintersect: Week 51 of 2014 shows same week total rail traffic (from same week one year ago) improved according to the Association of American Railroads (AAR) traffic data. The rate of growth continues to be strong in all of the rolling averages reported below. This analysis is looking for clues in the rail data to show the…
In January, Democratic Senator Harry Reid will retire from being the Majority Leader – with Republican Mitch McConnell as his replacement. McConnell is a consummate Washington insider. After graduating from the University of Louisville in 1964, he traveled to Washington, D.C. to become an intern for Senator John Sherman Cooper. Later, he worked for both…
by Rick Wright Hello traders! In this week’s Lessons from the Pros Newsletter I’d like to go into a brief explanation of trading with the trend, and a common pattern to help you trade against the trend. First of all, by now you have all heard the phrase (or one like it) that “the trend is…
When “the retirement of the baby boomers is expected to severely cut U.S. stock values in the near future,” is the ominous initial sentence from no lesser maintainer-of-the-status-quo than the San Francisco Fed’s research department, one begins to recognize the Federal Reserve’s overall need to hyper-inflate asset prices at whatever cost for fear of the ‘wealth’ destruction looming….
Common practice in major economies around the world is to publish quarterly estimates of economic output, as the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These figures are given as a relative measure showing the percentage by which the economy has grown or contracted in comparison to the previous quarter. Frequently, growth is estimated for the full year, to…
