Shell Fires Another 10,000 As reflective of trends in the industry Shell Fires 10,000 Workers As its fortunes collapse due to falling oil prices, Royal Dutch Shell PLC will fire 10,000 people in an effort to bolster margins. Operating costs have reduced by $4 billion, or around 10% in 2015, and the company expects Shell’s costs…
The improbable success of The Big Short, a scathing and hilarious tutorial on making money during a financial crisis, probably has a lot of people thinking that now might be a good time to start betting against the current bubble(s). That’s a well-timed thought because it comes after three long years in which shorting was really,…
It has been over four decades since my discharge from the US Army. During the short time I spent in service to our country, I had the privilege of becoming friends with a number of battle hardened veterans. These were special people who had the ability to face fear, adjust plans and, most importantly, lead…
This Great Graphic, composed on Bloomberg, shows two-time series. The white line is the premium the US government pays to borrow over the Canadian government for two years. The yellow line the US dollar against the Canadian dollar. Even though it appears to be a good fit, our eyes can be deceived, and Bloomberg automatically aligns the scales to show…
The market outlook for 2016 presents significant challenges and opportunities we have not seen for 40 years. Since I began work on creating our first bullion fund in 1998, I have generally restricted my commentary to using precious metals for strategic portfolio allocation. Everyone agrees that investment portfolios should be diversified. Since gold is the…
A full month has now passed since the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates for the first time since 2006. This development created a far different environment than many investors anticipated. In fact, many of the funds that were considered at the top of a rate hike “play book” need to be reconsidered in light of…
I recently wrote to you about a number of factors that show the stock market saw a major top back in May 2015. The most glaring? Small-cap stocks have diverged massively from large-cap since May. They’re down 24% while large-caps are down only 12%. This is the classic sign that the dumb money is pouring in…
Since the Great Recession’s inception, whenever the stock market dropped like a steel anvil or the U.S. economy showed signs of weakness, the Federal Reserve acted to inspire investor confidence. For example, in November of 2008, when the Fed announced its first quantitative easing (QE1) program to buy mortgage-backed securities (MBS), stocks rocketed 10% in…
While all the doom and gloomers are running into their bunkers to snuggle with their bars of gold the real visionaries of the future are licking their lips in the current environment. With interest rates close to 0% and commodities plummeting to 20 year lows the current environment is presenting itself as one of the…
Be careful in analyzing this data set with a microscope as the potential error ranges and backward revisions are significant. Also the nature of this industry variations from month to month so the rolling averages are the best way to view this series – and the data remains in the range we have seen over…
