With all the focus on falling crude oil prices (chart below) as well as sharp reductions in the cost of gasoline (including retail), jet fuel, and heating oil, it’s easy to miss the fact that prices of other energy products have been hit quite hard as well. Source: barchart Here are a few examples: 1. US natural gas price…
“Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that…
Barring a big move on Monday, the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 isn’t going to be the beneficiary of a so-called Santa Claus rally. The S&P 500 (SPX) (SPY) is now down 1.1% since the Christmas break, versus the average 1.8% gain we usually see during this period of the year. That,…
Some people have fixated upon the near doubling of the minimum wage after WW II (one person misidentifies the date as 1948, but it’s actually 1950) as a cause of disemployment in certain groups. This may have happened; however, the increase in the minimum wage from $0.40 to $0.75 was not associated with a decrease…
USDJPY tumbles to a 119 handle briefly before Japan opened to its normal JPY-selling spike temporarily lifted the pair ‘off the lows’. This drop dragged stock futures lower with Nikkei 225 tumbling over 350 points from its Friday trading highs. Oil prices continue to slide (WTI now with a $51 handle) and EURUSD is bouncing back from…
Here are my forecasts for upcoming economic data.
<< Read Wine Buyers, Sellers and Grape Growers, Part 1: What The Future Holds Whenever considering investing in the “drinking industry”, it is worth looking at the holdings of The Vice Fund (VICEX), now strangely renamed the “USA Mutuals Barrier Investor Fund.” VICEX limits its investments to drinking, smoking, gambling and defense on the grounds…
For the past few months, I have been maintaining a weekly column on this website showing the status and trends in oil inventories and petroleum products production in the United States. Regrettably, the holiday festivities prevented me from providing my usual weekly update last week and this update is a few days later than I…
Although volatility levels have increased in 2014 thanks to an unprecedented drop in oil prices and wobbling global growth, the U.S. economy continues to climb on the back of growing consumer confidence, an improving employment picture, contained inflation and decent housing data. The economy has grown 4.6% in Q2 and 5% in Q3 after a…
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” Gilles Deleuze A reader ‘Joyce’ sent an email to me today, and rather than just provide a complete answer to her I thought I would take the opportunity to expand on this…
