At Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., the Almunia settlement with the EU was seen as such a fait accompli that staff assigned to the case started to work on other things. It turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Almunia couldn’t muster the political support inside the European Commission to ratify the deal. It…
Aflac is a supplemental life, health, and accident insurer with operations in the United States and Japan. The company generates about 75% of its revenue in Japan, with the remaining 25% coming from the United States. Aflac is a very shareholder friendly company. The company has increased its dividend payments for 32 consecutive years. This makes Aflac a…
The Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath — considered to be one of the most “well-connected” Fed reporters — writes today that “A Bad Jobs Report Still Might Not Shake Fed’s View.” In other words, today’s payrolls data from the Labor Department that’s scheduled for release later this morning at 08:30 am eastern isn’t likely to derail the central bank’s…
OVERNIGHT MARKETS AND NEWS September E-mini S&Ps (ESU15 -0.17%) are down -0.10% and European stocks are down -0.38% ahead of monthly U.S. payroll data for July that may give clues to the pace and timing of a Fed interest rate increase. European stocks also fell after German Jun industrial production unexpectedly declined at the fastest pace in 10 months. Miners…
After going nowhere for the past week, last night Chinese equities opened with a bid tone and traded in the green all day long, resulting in the Shanghai composite ending the week with a gain of 2.2%, on what is gradually becoming a replica of US low volume levitation (to be expected after a third…
The Non-Farm Payroll (NFP) measures the change in the number of people who have been employed in sectors of the US economy excluding the agricultural sector, for the previous month. The NFP measures the number of jobs added/lost for the previous month in all sectors of the US economy except agriculture. The data is released…
While the US jobs report has been among the most important economic releases in the monthly cycle, it takes on even more significance in the run-up to the September FOMC meeting. The dollar has been confined to narrow trading ranges with small down. It is a particularly difficult number to forecast though some of the data…
The WTI Crude Oil market continues to show weakness during the Thursday session as we broke down below the $45 barrier. Because of this, I think we are going to continue to sell off every time we rally and therefore I’m looking for short-term rallies to take advantage of as selling opportunities. I think that…
(Video length 00:02:11) During the session on Friday, the US Nonfarm Payroll numbers come out, and as a result we believe that the US dollar and the US stock markets will take focus. Looking at the expected number of 220,000 jobs added for the month of July, we need to understand that any shock to the system via a bad numbers…
It turns out making money trading stocks is not “easier than farmwork” and, as China Daily reports, a stunning 24 million Chinese ‘investors’ have shuttered their trading accounts since the end of June. Unlike in the U.S., where institutions dominate stock trading, retail investors are king in China, owning around 80% of listed stocks’ tradable shares,…
