Have you been to the zoo when the monkeys start rattling their cages and screeching in unison? That about sums up the last 24 hours since the euro zone’s December CPI printed at negative 0.2% versus prior year. Within minutes of the release, brokerage house “economists” were out in force caterwauling that $1 trillion of ECB bond purchases…
My dogs are telling me that there are squirrels running loose in the neighborhood that must be pursued, so I’ll make this quick. All it took was one little word – “catastrophic” – from a Fed governor to send the markets into a bullish orgy today. It wasn’t a good day for me, but I…
Investing in a stock means you have bought a small piece of ownership of that business. Dividend stocks differ from normal stocks in that they pay you for owning them. When a company elects to pay dividends, they are giving a portion of company profits to the owners. Stocks that reward their owners with actual cash…
We are seeing a resurgence of effective demand from both long term yields (borrowing costs) and headline inflation falling. What if 10-year yields fall to 1.6% by 2nd quarter 2015? And what if headline inflation falls to -0.5% by 2nd Q too? (Barclays is predicting negative headline inflation through 2015, Matthew B tweet.) I graph what…
Stocks were on a tear higher today despite the worse than expected unemployment claims. The pundits were talking about ‘oil stabilizing’ as given a boost to stocks, and the foolishness of the first few days of the year correction, but in reality it was the reassuring words from the Fed head last night that the…
The headline, fictional, seasonally adjusted number for initial unemployment claims came in at 294,000, which was not materially more than the Wall Street conomist crowd consensus guess of 290,000. It was a non event. The actual, not seasonally finagled numbers, which the Wall Street captured media ignores, shows claims continuing at all time record low levels. The…
Over the previous six years, the stock market is not the only thing that has gone up. Total U.S. debt has catapulted from roughly $10.5 trillion – give or take $100 billion – to $18.0 trillion. That’s a 70% increase in the country’s outstanding obligations since the start of 2009. Perhaps ironically, I have spent…
Richard “Rich” Masterson, a Midland, Texas-based consulting geologist, has helped originate oil and gas projects with previously unseen potential. In this interview with The Energy Report, Masterson describes the significance of innovative science and new methods of prospecting to locate and liberate large amounts of energy, regardless of NIMBY politics like those playing out in New York…
There are two ways of seeing the world: You can look at the small details, possibly missing the larger picture. This is often called mental accounting. Or, you could only look at the larger picture, possibly missing important details. This is often called the illusion of attention. In The Invisible Gorilla, authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons give…
Blue Line 4 Week Average The market was expecting the weekly initial unemployment claims at 280,000 to 297,000 (consensus 290,000) vs the 294,000 reported. The more important (because of the volatility in the weekly reported claims and seasonality errors in adjusting the data) 4 week moving average moved from 290,750 (reported last week as 290,750) to…
