U.S. Durable Goods Orders Rise 3.4% in June, blared the Wall Street Journal headline this morning. As usual, not only is that not the whole story, it’s misleading. It’s wrong. It’s dumb. It raises the question of why the mainstream media adamantly refuses to report the facts. More importantly, why do they ignore the blatantly obvious…
The big economic number this week will be the Q2 Advance Estimate for GDP on Thursday at 8:30 AM ET. With the Q1 GDP of -0.2% behind us, what do economists see in their collective crystal ball for Q2 of 2015? Let’s take a look at the latest GDP forecasts from the latest Wall Street…
The whole “market economy” thing is turning out to be a little trickier than China’s dictators expected. To set up the story: After the 2008 crash the country borrowed about $15 trillion (an amount that dwarfs the US Fed’s quantitative easing programs) and spent the proceeds on history’s biggest infrastructure program. This pushed up…
“Davidson” submits: Bloomberg has a good article on recent volatility of Chinese markets which is a good read at this point in the global economic/investment cycle. China as part of the emerging market asset class (EEM) peaked in early 2011 and then had a recent spike which represented highly speculative anticipation by Chinese investors of’…
The recent commodities sell-off has been breathtaking. This is especially true since the most-recent downturn occurred from a level where the expected future returns from commodity index investment were reasonably good – and, as a spread above expected equity or bond returns, probably around the best levels ever. But investors have a strong tendency to…
Another “Oops!” Moment in Shanghai Is there anything the Chinese authorities haven’t tried yet in their attempt to manipulate the Shanghai stock market back up again? Off the cuff there’s nothing we can think of, except maybe shutting the market down entirely. As we have previously pointed out, Chinese investors have fallen prey to the…
Life is full of irony. When I was in school, I hated history. It was boring. It was pointless. How was reading about a bunch of dead people ever going to be useful in life? Today, I consume everything I can find on history. Particularly, financial history. Ironic. Of course, it only took me 25…
When we first exposed the shockingly dire lack of breadth in US equity markets, it was shrugged off by the mainstream media as yet another ‘worry’ in the wall to climb. It seems, however, that facts inevitably force their way to the surface and so both Bloomberg (more than 100% of this year’s increase in the S&P 500…
The Bank of Japan is engaged in the most aggressive asset purchases, and yet it has largely failed to lift inflation. National consumer prices for June will be reported at the end of this week. The headline rate is expected to fall to 0.3% year-over-year from 0.5% in May. This would be the smallest increase since…
Euronav NV (EURN – Snapshot Report) is a crude tanker pure play, and is the third largest public operator of Suezmax and VLCC vessels. Currently, OPEC is producing high levels of crude, and is expected to continue this pattern over the foreseeable future. Euronav is extremely well positioned in the crude tanker market to take advantage of these…
