These are great times for financial assets — and by implication for finance companies that make and sell them, right? Alas, no. Just the opposite.
One of the big surprises of the past few years is the number of brand-name hedge funds reporting terrible results. Their customers are not amused:
In normal times, some asset classes are expensive others are cheap, making it easy to use historical relationships to decide where to invest. That’s not
Two short months ago it was generally expected that US interest rates would rise for the balance of the year — a move made possible
Pretend, for a minute, that your country responds to the bursting of a credit bubble by borrowing unprecedented amounts of money and using it to
The theory was pretty straightforward: push interest rates down far enough — in some cases to negative territory where borrowers actually turn a profit on
It’s unclear what China was thinking when it was borrowed all those trillions to quadruple its capacity to make steel, cement and other basic industrial
For the past 50 or so years, the quickest way for a sharp young sociopath to get rich has been to join an investment bank
Goldman, Morgan Stanley and IBM release numbers that look, well, depression-like. Housing starts plunge, gold and silver spike, China’s bond market seizes up, and Deutsche
So it seems that China’s economy, caught in the grip of a credit crisis just a few months ago, is all better. And so, by
Corporate profitability is one of the canaries in today’s financial coal mine. If companies are making more money each year they tend to hire more
In that deservedly-famous 2006 CNBC debate between Peter Schiff and economist Arthur Laffer (in which the latter manages to be both arrogant and wrong about
Talk about diminished expectations. This morning’s estimate of 1.4% Q4 GDP growth is being hailed as a pleasant surprise. Which is odd, considering that for
Savers are the obvious victims of the past few years’ plunge in interest rates. But there are other casualties, including money market funds, which have
This morning, US existing home sales plunged and the Chicago Fed’s national activity index turned negative. Both are obvious signs of a slowing economy. Anticipating
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