Of the four Federal Reserve districts which have released their July manufacturing surveys – two forecast weak growth and three are in marginal contraction. A complete summary follows. There was no market expections from Bloomberg this month. From the Dallas Fed: Texas factory activity declined slightly in July, according to business executives responding to the…
Hedge Funds’ net long position in WTI Crude collapsed 27% (the biggest single ‘dump’ in over 3 years) ahead of the big plunge last week (and is now down almost 60% in the last month – the most since 2010). Part of a broader deflationary collapse in commodities, as Bloomberg reports, long positions dropped to a two-year…
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Nearly 1,800 stocks, over 60% of issues traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges fell by the daily limit of 10% and were halted according to a Financial Times report. When contacted by the Financial Times, the China Securities Regulatory Commission refused to answer any questions. The amusing comment of the day comes from Zhu Ning,…
Allegheny Tech (ATI – Analyst Report) negatively preannounced their Q215 forecast due to difficult conditions for their Flat Rolled Products, and in the oil and gas markets as well. Further, declining nickel prices, and high imports of Asian stainless steel were additional headwinds for the company. To compound matters, these conditions do not appear to be alleviated anytime…
With ongoing volatility expected in the gold space, mostly owing to global economic weakness, investors should focus on quality gold names with three key attributes to weather the current metal price environment, explains Joseph Fazzini, vice president and senior analyst with Toronto-based Dundee Capital Markets. Fazzini says those attributes are low-cost, long-life assets; defensive balance…
U.S. Durable Goods Orders Rise 3.4% in June, blared the Wall Street Journal headline this morning. As usual, not only is that not the whole story, it’s misleading. It’s wrong. It’s dumb. It raises the question of why the mainstream media adamantly refuses to report the facts. More importantly, why do they ignore the blatantly obvious…
The big economic number this week will be the Q2 Advance Estimate for GDP on Thursday at 8:30 AM ET. With the Q1 GDP of -0.2% behind us, what do economists see in their collective crystal ball for Q2 of 2015? Let’s take a look at the latest GDP forecasts from the latest Wall Street…
The whole “market economy” thing is turning out to be a little trickier than China’s dictators expected. To set up the story: After the 2008 crash the country borrowed about $15 trillion (an amount that dwarfs the US Fed’s quantitative easing programs) and spent the proceeds on history’s biggest infrastructure program. This pushed up…
“Davidson” submits: Bloomberg has a good article on recent volatility of Chinese markets which is a good read at this point in the global economic/investment cycle. China as part of the emerging market asset class (EEM) peaked in early 2011 and then had a recent spike which represented highly speculative anticipation by Chinese investors of’…
