Yves here. Wolf is flagging the end-game in the efforts to present US corporate earnings as being on a decent upward trajectory. The fact that Apple disclosed last week that it spent $14 billion in a two-week period buying back stock should be seen as a massive sell signal. As one of my stock jockey buddies remarked, “If the company won’t invest in its business, why should I?”
Read more...After having denied feverishly that any kind of bubble exists, people watch incredulously as the hot air hisses out of the very bubble whose existence they’re still denying. And afterwards, everyone had seen it coming. Because cracks had been visible for a long time.
One of the cracks is Twitter.
Read more...In case you missed it, it’s ugly out there. US markets swooned as an unexpectedly weak manufacturing report, the ISM, was so bad it couldn’t be attributed solely to bad weather and deepened investor funk.
Read more...Emerging markets-related disruption continued overnight, as the Nikkei fell nearly 2%, pounded by the rise in the yen due to its status as a flight currency. Other Asian markets took a hit as well, with only Australia emerging relatively unscathed.
Read more...In the runup to the global financial crisis, George Magnus, who was then chief economist at UBS, was one of the most insightful commentators and was early to call how bad things might get. He’s back to sound alarms about the emerging markets turmoil.
Read more...A brief surge of optimism, in the form of a short-lived rally in the belegured Turkish Lira and South African rand after their central banks raised interest rates to try to halt the plunge in currency values, has fizzled. And the Fed reducing its dosage of market tonic, in the form of QE, only soured investors’ already bad mood.
Read more...Journalists and laypeople tend to use stock markets at their proxy for economic and financial market conditions. The performance of US stock markets looked like an encouraging return to a semblance of normalcy after last week’s squall, until a wave of selling in the final hour, with 600 million shares of volume, pushed the major indexes solidly into negative territory. As of this writing, that barometer is still a bit wobbly. Australia was down 1.26% overnight and the Nikkei off .17%. But Chinese and the Singapore markets are up, as are European and the S&P and DJIA indices.
But some of the explanations are less persuasive than others.
Read more...That is the question today. Let’s first ask markets.
Read more...An article in the Financial Times by Tracy Alloway gives yet another sighting that bond investors are getting a bit frantic in their hunt for yield. The piece has the eyepopping title, Yield-hungry investors snap up US homeless bond. It uses recent deals in the CMBS (commercial mortgage backed securities) market as a proxy for bond investors’ QE-driven hunt for more return.
Read more...George Soros has caused a bit of a frisson by calling China the greatest risk to the global economy. The Chinese shadow banks are the trouble spot to watch.
Read more...Nothing could have been a more potent metaphor for the current investment climate than the headline, “Macau gambling revenue hits record $45 bn in 2013.”
Read more...Yves here. As Wolf describes, in our brave new work of super-low interest rates, the 10 year Treasury breaching 3% was regarded with fear and loathing by the officialdom. Now with the Fed’s reassurances that the Fed funds rate will remain at just about zero for the foreseeable future, the stock market has popped the Champagne. But will the impact of the withdrawal of support for bond prices impact stocks sooner than the current rally would have you believe?
Read more...Lambert here: Tapeworms at play.
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Testosterone Pit.
Financial engineering had a glorious year in 2013. The last time we had this much crazy fun had been in 2007. Back then, Merger Mondays were hot on CNBC. Deals, no matter how large and how insanely leveraged, were announced with great hoopla. Rational people were seen shaking their heads at incongruous moments. Stocks were defying gravity. That was the last time we had this much fun because the bubble collapsed, and some of its detritus was skillfully heaped on the Fed’s balance sheet or on the taxpayer’s shoulders.
Read more...The Fed’s announcing the taper was supposed to be an earth-shaking event. But that actually sorta happened last summer when Bernanke first used the “t” word and interest and mortgage rates made an impressive upward march in a short period of time.
From my considerable remove, what was noteworthy about the Fed’s announcement yesterday is how terrified it seems to be of creating an upset.
Read more...One of the amusing things right now is that there isn’t much debate in equity-land as to whether to be long or not.
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