Welcome to edition 236 and the last edition of Insider Weekends for 2014. We have been publishing these posts continuously for over 4.5 years and it has been a great learning experience. While insiders as a group have outperformed the market more often than not, they are also often early and sometimes completely wrong. One…
by Dirk Ehnts, Econoblog101 I have lately asked whether the private sector – firms and households – can borrow from the central bank, and the answer was no. I should have made it clear, perhaps, that the “no” is not a “never” but a “no, but”. Since there is not one central bank but many, rules differ….
There may be no correlation between economic growth (GDP) and the stock market in the US; and in China too, as Joshua M Brown shows below. This is because GDP only partially reflects corporate earnings and because earnings are only one factor affecting the performance of the stock market. So what of the frenetic trading around the weekly and…
To everybody’s surprise, this year started off with most emerging markets regaining their ground lost in 2013 due to ‘taper tantrums’. In fact, some of these markets proved huge contributors to global recovery (Read: 3 International ETFs Beating SPY This Year) Developing nations were assisted by a number of factors in this time period that helped…
The car is at the center of the biggest boom in subprime lending since the mortgage crisis, and The NY Times reports, similar to how a red-hot mortgage market once coaxed millions of borrowers into recklessly tapping the equity in their homes, the new boom is also leading people to take out risky lines of credit known…
Reader Steven Kopits writes “potential GDP model is also a binding constraint model”, so GDP “…is subject to some sort of natural speed limit which cannot be exceeded”. This assertion is so amazingly absolutist in nature, and represents such a misunderstanding of how macroeconomists typically think of potential, that I am moved to observe that if this…
Deals and Financings Otsuka Pharma (OTSKF) of Japan snagged marketing rights to Iclusig®, a leukemia drug developed by Ariad Pharma (NSDQ: ARIA), for Japan, China and eight other Asian countries (see story). Otsuka will pay $77.5 million upfront plus additional regulatory milestones. Ariad will receive a “substantial” share of net product revenues. Iclusig, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor,…
Russia’s new military doctrine lists NATO, U.S. as major foreign threats AFP Photo / Natalia Kolesnikova Russia has adopted an updated version of its military doctrine, which reflects the emergence of new threats against its national security. NATO military buildup, and American Prompt Global Strike concept are listed among them. The new doctrine was approved…
Standing on the threshold of 2015, if you have appetite for ‘big game’ stocks in a volatile market, you ought to first screen the broader sector for the prized catches. Various studies and historical data have proved beyond doubt that average stocks that belong to top-performing industries have greater probability to outperform the so-called ‘blue-chips’…
UPDATE: *SINGAPORE AVIATION: SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATIONS ACTIVATED An Air Asia Indonesia flight from Surabaya in east Java to Singapore carrying 155 passengers has gone missing, Air Asia has confirmed. As Bloomberg reported, the flight departed Surabaya at 5:20am local time and lost contact soon after… Contact was lost at 6:17 a.m. local time (23:17…
