Oil recovered slightly yesterday and is currently trading above $38 per barrel although the black gold remains under pressure. Soft trade numbers from China on Tuesday highlighted the struggle facing the worlds’s 2nd largest economy, only serving to confirm concerns over cooling demand. Asian stocks were trading slightly lower this Wednesday morning reflecting current sentiment…
Reader “GM”, an actuary student in Malaysia pinged me with an accurate observation on demographics, but missed the boat on a solution. GM writes …. I thought I would point out the reason for this monetary madness, which I believe you had brought up before. Aging populations consume less, and have different consumption patterns to…
If something very strange happens and continues over an extended period, people get accustomed to it and come to view it as normal. That’s especially so when the strange set of circumstances is the result of a policy that, as a result of devotion to a wrong theory or strategy, is widely considered to be…
Yesterday’s Trading: By the end of Tuesday, the euro was up against the dollar by 60 points to 1.0891. The Swiss franc was also stronger against the USD. The Aussie and the pound were down. The market is undergoing a correctional phase after the ECB meeting and Draghi’s words. Main news of the day (EET):…
Another Bump Higher In one of our recent updates on the weakness in the manufacturing sector we have mentioned the surge in the sum of charge-offs and delinquencies of commercial and industrial loans at US banks (hat tip to our friend BC, who inspired the chart below). As we were arguing at the time, this…
The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is a simple computation: You take the Civilian Labor Force (people age 16 and over employed or seeking employment) and divide it by the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (those 16 and over not in the military and or committed to an institution). The result is the participation rate expressed as…
Between commodity-backed financing deals and the centrally-planned mal-investment boom-driven excess capacity, China has a lot of ‘liquidation’ to do to normalize from a credit-fueled smoke-and-mirrors world to a painful reality. As Bloomberg notes, there’s no let-up in the onslaught of commodities from China. While the country’s total exports are slowing in dollar terms (as we noted last night), shipments…
Ibbotson Associates provides asset allocation guidelines that span the risk spectrum from conservative to aggressive. The moderate portfolio consists of roughly 42% in U.S. Stock, 18% in Non-U.S. Stock, 35% Fixed Income and 5% in Cash. It follows that the static Ibbotson model might employ the following ETFs to achieve its moderate growth and income…
The extreme carnage that we are witnessing in the junk bond market right now is one of the clearest signals yet that a major U.S. stock market crash is imminent. For those that are not familiar with “junk bonds”, please don’t get put off by the name. They aren’t really “junk”. They simply have a…
YouTube Red is a disruptive product created to take on Netfix and Spotify. Rising Netflix and Spotify subscribers shows that there is certainly a market for YouTube Red. Google/Alphabet has everything in place to ensure that YouTube Red is a roaring success. Alphabet Launches YouTube Red Alphabet Inc-C (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently released YouTube Red in the United States, and…
