Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. Yves’ posting will be at a low ebb over the next week (post-book trauma!). So, I will be covering some of the bases in the interim. Expect at least a post per weekday through next week. Below is one I wrote on the employment numbers which came in […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns This is a post I wrote earlier to day at Credit Writedowns. I just noticed that Albert Edwards and David Rosenberg are saying similar things. See the FT Alphaville post on their comments here. As for me, for the last few months, I have been casting around looking […]
Read more...I’m not certain I would give Greenspan great market as a stock market seer, but he may have gotten better over time. He saw the stock market as frothy in 1996 (the time of his famed “irrational exuberance” remark, and was a skeptic through most of the equity bubble, then threw in the towel and […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. Hi all. Yves is getting slammed because of her book project, so I am stepping in with a few additional posts over the next few days. I may have a few investment posts (which Yves usually avoids) to run by you. Below is the first investment-oriented one, a […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. A 2005 letter in premier scientific journal Nature reviews the research on trust and economics: Trust … plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down. In the absence of trust in a country’s institutions and leaders, […]
Read more...Um, this isn’t exactly consistent with the recovery story. From MarketWatch: Employers’ hiring plans for the upcoming fourth quarter dropped to their lowest level in the history of Manpower’s Employment Outlook Survey, which started in 1962. A net -3% of employers said they’ll hire in the fourth quarter, down from -2% in the third quarter, […]
Read more...We’ve commented from time to time on dubious Chinese data releases. But this report from Foreign Policy reports on an interest aspect: that the statistics are not manipulated only in the normal bureaucratic manner (fudging them) but also by getting companies to change behavior so it can be tallied in a more flattering fashion. The […]
Read more...Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has not given up on his deflationary views, which until recently were quite an outlier. But some recent data releases give support to his downbeat take. From the Telegraph: CPI inflation has dropped to –2.2pc in Japan (a modern record), -2.1pc in the US, -1.8pc in China, -1.4pc in Spain, -0.7pc in France, […]
Read more...Note that while this Bloomberg story discusses that some major hedge funds are skeptical of the theory that the recovery is on, for the most part, it is silent on how they are implementing that view. Recall that even if a trader does make a correct fundamental call, investing successfully on it is another matter. […]
Read more...I have set you up to misinterpret that headline, but that’s OK. I know that sophisticated modern finance people are not supposed to believe in technical trading. It’s sort of like believing in astrology. Yet pretty much every serious investor I know pays attention to it, even if it is not a major factor in […]
Read more...I don’t believe in market calls, and trying to time turns is a perilous game. But most savvy people I know have been skeptical of this rally, beyond the initial strong bounce off the bottom. It has not had the characteristics of a bull market. Volumes have been underwhelming, no new leadership group has emerged, […]
Read more...Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. It has been my thesis for some time that we are seeing a secular change in consumption patterns in the United States. This will have grave implications for a world economy used to seeing the American consumer as an economic growth engine and consumer of first choice. Retail […]
Read more...It was mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who first discovered in 1962, by crunching 100 years of cotton trading data, that markets have “fat tails” or more extreme risks than the standard models predict. A less oft cited finding of Mandelbrot’s was that markets have memory, in colloquial terms. Calm days tend to be followed by calm […]
Read more...Comstock Partners has a new newsletter out, and it makes a cogent case that there is no pretty way out of our over-leveraged mess. The disheartening bit is not only the narrative but a series of charts. One, on debt to GDP, show that it has risen in the last year (debt was roughly $49 […]
Read more...Wellie, we get a bit of cheery news of sorts to take the edge off the sting that Goldman, presumably alive today thanks to the many ministrations of the government, ultimately borne by chumps like you and me, is off again looting making money hand over fist. It appears that quite a lot of Goldman […]
Read more...