Is there a chance that the resolution of Australia’s election will be good for stocks? Of course! Stocks, and the investors who buy them, hate uncertainty. By Saturday night, we’ll know for certain who the next do-gooder in Chief will be in Australia. Although we’ve never passed a gall stone, it must be a little like enduring the platitudes of two insipid politicians making bland promises and trying desperately to conceal their true selves from voters until after they secure power.
August 20th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 0 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "economy"
Party like it’s 1599
And so begins yet another day where we have no idea what the world will bring us. But let’s have a crack anyway. At the top of the list of today’s thoughts is whether a contraction in global credit means there will be fewer good investment opportunities. Without an ocean of credit to float on, good businesses will have to sink or swim on their own merits. But first, here is something that looks like it might be good news for the trader types.
August 19th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 9 comments | Continued
Boomer Consumers Reduce Spending. Economy Exhales.
Boomers are cutting back? Of course boomers are cutting back! They’re getting ready for retirement. They need to save some money. It was loony to think you could finance your retirement out of the increases in your house’s value. Who were you going to sell the house to? Boomers were the biggest buyers of houses.
August 18th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 1 comment | Continued
August, and Everything After
Before we get into this week’s first episode of “As the U.S. Dollar disintegrates” we should point out that some people are go about the business of making money in almost any conditions. Last week we read a draft version of Dr. Alex Cowie’s latest investment recommendation in Diggers and Drillers. He was writing about the “micro-cap” of base metals. Huh?
August 16th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 0 comments | Continued
No Doubt About the Road Ahead
Another week gone by. Nothing has been learned. Nothing has been proven. Nothing has been decided.In the markets, we mean. It looks like the stock market is finally rolling over. After a big drop on Wednesday, the Dow followed up with a modest drop yesterday – down another 58 points. Is the market really headed down?
August 16th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
Debunking Deflation
You will recall that during the bottom of the previous bear-market, most of the pundits were shunning ‘risky assets’ (stocks and commodities) and they were advocating a heavy exposure to cash and fixed income assets. Back then, the vast majority of strategists and their devotees were erroneously fretting about deflation.
August 13th, 2010 | Puru Saxena | 8 comments | Continued
Bridging the Fiscal Gap of Unfunded Liabilities
The stock market took a tumble yesterday. The Dow fell 265 points after investors had a chance to ruminate about the Fed’s latest action. It wasn’t what the Fed did or said that discouraged investors. It was what it didn’t say and what it didn’t do. It didn’t say, for example, that it was going to “crank up the printing presses”.
August 13th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
More Debt to Fight the Correction and Other Absurdities
Federal Reserve officials decided to reinvest principal payments on mortgage holdings into long-term Treasury securities, making their first attempt to bolster growth since March 2009 to keep the slowing US economy from relapsing into recession.”The pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated,” …
August 12th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
Demanding Demand
What about here in Australia, though? The amount of money being lent for housing fell by 3.9% in June according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It was the lowest amount for housing finance since February of 2001, which was over nine years ago. What does that tell you? It tells you that the largest factor on “underlying demand” for Australian housing is the price of money. When the price of money is cheap, the demand for housing goes up.
August 11th, 2010 | Dan Denning | 42 comments | Continued
The “Road to Serfdom”
The US government is pursuing the same misguided strategy that has failed for twenty years to revive Japan’s economy. This strategy consists of squandering taxpayer dollars on failed financial institutions, and prop up unaffordable federal and state spending programs. One key difference: Japan’s competitive export-oriented manufacturing base was…
August 11th, 2010 | Dan Amoss | 3 comments | Continued
The Economic Recovery Flop
After 18 months and $2.5 trillion in counter-cyclical budget deficits, people have begun to realize that the ‘recovery’ is a flop. What they haven’t realized – yet – is why. But, it’s summer…no one is doing too much thinking now. Obama went for a vacation in Maine. Hillary married her daughter. Economists are fishing.
August 10th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 1 comment | Continued
Fake Plastic Economy
Our guess is that it is both. What is most remarkable about this whole episode is that the people who are most responsible for it – in the sense that they caused it…and that they now pretend to fix it – still show no evidence of understanding what it going on. Geithner did mention that households were paying down their debts.
August 9th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 5 comments | Continued
Road to Nowhere
Where is it going to get you in the next five years? Who knows? But with government influence and debt on the rise, there are probably some severe misallocations in the economy. On a global and local scale. At some point they are going to have to reallocate.
August 7th, 2010 | Nickolai Hubble | 0 comments | Continued
Dysfunctional Price Signals are Distorting the Housing Market
The price of anything, whether it is a cake of soap or a jumbo jet, is meant to convey a whole bunch of information to an investor, producer or consumer. Prices send signals up and down the supply chain and these signals determine the ultimate supply and demand of any product or service.
August 6th, 2010 | Greg Canavan | 95 comments | Continued
US Treasury Secretary a True Believer in Economic Recovery
Consumer spending, pending home sales and factory orders were all weaker than projected in June, showing the US recovery lost momentum heading into the second half of the year as employment stagnates. Elsewhere in the news it is reported that more consumers than ever before are going bankrupt…
August 6th, 2010 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
