The Federal Reserve upgraded its assessment of the labor market, and changed the future guidance from “considerable time” to “can be patient in beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy.” The statement also draws a distinction between market-based measures of inflation expectations, which have fallen, and survey-based measures, which are stable. We expect Yellen to…
The European Central bank has announced the total amount of money which was taken up by the banks in its second large push to shove its Long-Term Refinancing Offer (LTRO) down the throats of the banks. After the failure of September of this year where only a handful (255) banks took just 82.6B EUR, all…
Since the beginning of this year, Wall Street economists and analysts have been consistently prognosticating that following the Federal Reserve’s latest bond buying campaign, economic growth would gather steam and interest rates would begin to rise. This has consistently been the wrong call as I discussed in April of this year in “Interest Rate Predictions Meet…
Over the past eleven days, the S&P 500 has declined a little over 5%. This is now the 17th correction of greater than 5% since March 2009. As has been the case over the past few years, this minor short-term pullback has already led to chatter of a more dovish Fed to come. Many market participants…
Rosy GDP numbers may have cheered the masses, but John Williams of ShadowStats.com says we’re a long way from prosperity. In this interview with The Gold Report, Williams debunks the myth of economic recovery and warns that we still have serious debts to settle. That is why he is recommending caution in 2015 to preserve purchasing power and maintain…
General Mills Inc.’s (GIS – Analyst Report) beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in the second quarter of fiscal 2015. However, revenues missed the consensus mark as the consumer food company continues to battle weak demand in the U.S. and slowdown in some of the international markets. Second-Quarter Earnings Second-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 80…
After yesterday’s closing bell, Darden Restaurants posted better than expected results for Q4, the fourth S&P 500 company to report for the quarter. Earnings per share came in at $0.28, slightly higher than the Estimize expectation for $0.26, and even higher than the company’s own guidance of $0.27. Profits jumped 40% on a year-over-year basis, juxtaposed to…
Today I used Barchart to sort the S&P 500 Large Cap Index stocks to find the one with the most frequent new highs in the last month and at the top of the sort was the security exchange company The NASDAQ OMX Group (NASDAQ:NDAQ). Barchart technical indicators: 64% Bachart technical buy signals Trend Spotter buy signals – Up 7.34%…
Shinzo Abe’s bet paid off. With Japan sinking back into recession and the effectiveness of “Abenomics” called into serious question, the Japanese prime minister called a snap election two years early to secure a governing mandate. Well, he got it. Shinzo Abe and his coalition partners got 68% of the vote, giving him the political…
Here is a table showing the annualized change in Headline and Core CPI, not seasonally adjusted, for each of the past six months. I’ve also included each of the eight components of Headline CPI and a separate entry for Energy, which is a collection of sub-indexes in Housing and Transportation. We can make some inferences…
