Max is attending his first Comedian’s Convention. He’s very excited to see all the famous comics sitting at tables all around him. Jay Leno gets up and says “Number 64.” Everyone in the hall laughs uproariously, except Max. He turns to an older comedian and says, “What’s everybody laughing about?” “These are all professional comedians,”…
Written by Gary The afternoon markets drifted fractionally higher as the US dollar climbed back up into the important resistance zone that it broke out of once early this morning. WTI oil climber into the 48.70 range this afternoon, stopped and then traded sideways in a narrow trading zone until the close. Important to note that…
Have you been to the zoo when the monkeys start rattling their cages and screeching in unison? That about sums up the last 24 hours since the euro zone’s December CPI printed at negative 0.2% versus prior year. Within minutes of the release, brokerage house “economists” were out in force caterwauling that $1 trillion of ECB bond purchases…
My dogs are telling me that there are squirrels running loose in the neighborhood that must be pursued, so I’ll make this quick. All it took was one little word – “catastrophic” – from a Fed governor to send the markets into a bullish orgy today. It wasn’t a good day for me, but I…
Investing in a stock means you have bought a small piece of ownership of that business. Dividend stocks differ from normal stocks in that they pay you for owning them. When a company elects to pay dividends, they are giving a portion of company profits to the owners. Stocks that reward their owners with actual cash…
We are seeing a resurgence of effective demand from both long term yields (borrowing costs) and headline inflation falling. What if 10-year yields fall to 1.6% by 2nd quarter 2015? And what if headline inflation falls to -0.5% by 2nd Q too? (Barclays is predicting negative headline inflation through 2015, Matthew B tweet.) I graph what…
Stocks were on a tear higher today despite the worse than expected unemployment claims. The pundits were talking about ‘oil stabilizing’ as given a boost to stocks, and the foolishness of the first few days of the year correction, but in reality it was the reassuring words from the Fed head last night that the…
The headline, fictional, seasonally adjusted number for initial unemployment claims came in at 294,000, which was not materially more than the Wall Street conomist crowd consensus guess of 290,000. It was a non event. The actual, not seasonally finagled numbers, which the Wall Street captured media ignores, shows claims continuing at all time record low levels. The…
Over the previous six years, the stock market is not the only thing that has gone up. Total U.S. debt has catapulted from roughly $10.5 trillion – give or take $100 billion – to $18.0 trillion. That’s a 70% increase in the country’s outstanding obligations since the start of 2009. Perhaps ironically, I have spent…
Richard “Rich” Masterson, a Midland, Texas-based consulting geologist, has helped originate oil and gas projects with previously unseen potential. In this interview with The Energy Report, Masterson describes the significance of innovative science and new methods of prospecting to locate and liberate large amounts of energy, regardless of NIMBY politics like those playing out in New York…
