By Jim Pearce The day after Christmas – December 26th – is affectionately known as “Boxing Day” in many parts of the world. A holiday of sorts, it is named for the gift boxes that employers would give to their employees. Dating back to the Middle Ages, it’s generally believed that these gifts were fairly…
The U.S. stock market has come back strongly this year outplaying the global concerns including slowdown in China and other key emerging economies, turmoil in Russia, a struggling Europe, recession in Japan, geopolitical tensions and the biggest nightmare – the oil price havoc. In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 18,000 mark for…
Live Long and Prosper Statistically, a child born today is more likely to reach 100 than someone who is already 96 years old. And this is happening at a time when government resources are increasingly stretched and retirement ages are creeping upwards, when the populations of the developed nations are aging and the borders are increasingly…
It looked like a few rats tried to jump ship as the bell rang on 2014. But it is hard to trust any one day or week as a guide during the holidays so we can just call it what it was, a down week within a general US market uptrend. The strong uptrend however,…
A few weeks ago, we reported that for some still unexplained reason, the U.S. Treasury is ordering “survival kits” to its employees overseeing the federal banking system. To wit: The Department of Treasury is spending $200,000 on survival kits for all of its employees who oversee the federal banking system, according to a new solicitation. As FreeBeacon reports,…
China’s economy has surpassed the United States and is the new number one in the world. We forecast for more than a decade that China would become the new Financial Capital of the World by 2032. That entails more than just its GDP and purchasing power. To accomplish that goal requires a…
As we bid adieu to 2014 and step into 2015, the stock market and the key sectors warrant introspection. Amid macroeconomic uncertainties and global market upheavals, the sector that stood out in 2014 was Technology. This is evident by a substantially better performance by NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector (NDXT) index which rallied 25.1% year-to-date, exceeding Dow…
Everyone must have heard that the Russian central bank has raised interest rates once again. Chairman of the Russian central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, announced that her organization would step in again if the ruble continued to cause trouble. Her words did become reality. Interest rates in Russia have been raised from 10.5 to 17 percent,…
It’s a good time to be part of the proverbial 1%, that’s for sure. A Pew Research Center report shows that the wealth gap between America’s middle- and upper-income families is the widest ever recorded. In fact, the median wealth of America’s most affluent families is nearly seven times that of their…
U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday as crude oil prices continued their descent. The S&P (SPX) closed out a third straight year of double-digit gains. For the year, the Dow ended up 7.5 percent, notching its sixth straight annual gain while the Nasdaq rose 13.4 percent. The best-performing S&P component in 2014 was Southwest Airlines Co (LUV) up…
