Global Market Commentary, Analysis and Investments
“Look, I’m sick of reading about bubbles — no matter what the conversation,” wrote our own Greg Guenthner in yesterday’s Trend Playbook.
“It’s clear that the 2008 crash remains a psychological burden to most investors. So they continue to categorize any rising asset price as a bubble.”
“I have not done anything wrong,” Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’ nonprofit division, told a congressional hearing. “I have not broken any laws.” Then she invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to be second-guessed by the Congress that is supposed to be watching over all agencies of government.
[Read more...]It was another crazy session for the Nikkei today.
After rising 3% out of the gate after Thursday’s bloodbath, the Japanese index embarked on a wild ride. By early afternoon, it had given it all back and more. Still, it fought higher to finish the day with a modest gain.
That’s a 3% rise after 7% drop— ending in a small gain after another downside scare (in case you were keeping score). That’s enough torment to keep the average Japanese investor awake for many nights to come. I suspect this is just the beginning of some wild price action across the Pacific…
[Read more...]How many times have I started a weekly note by stating that “I’m in fill-in-the-blank”? That is, I might be in Houston, Denver, New York, Toronto, London or someplace else for some conference or another.
Well, this week I’m in Pittsburgh — my hometown. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) was nice enough to schedule its 2013 annual convention here in the (former) Steel City. I can commute to the event on a streetcar.
[Read more...]“There’s a term in chess called zugzwang,” writes Michael Sivy at Time, “which describes the point in a game when it’s your turn to move but every move you could make would worsen your situation. That’s pretty much what the chessboard looked like for Ben Bernanke this morning.”’
[Read more...]Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham, of Boston-based fund manager GMO, recently said:
“The investment business has taught me — increasingly as the years have passed — that people, especially investors (and, I believe, Americans) prefer good news and wishful thinking to bad news, and that there are always vested interests to offer facile, optimistic alternatives to the bad news. The good news is, obviously, an easier sell.”
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In 2011, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm put out a white paper called We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters. His thesis was that computers are getting faster, cheaper and better… but when it comes to transportation, energy, commodity production, food production — “real stuff” — human progress is at a standstill.
[Read more...]It’s come to this: A typical family’s health insurance costs as much as a typical family car.
If you’re a typical American family, your “health” will set you back $20,728 every year. That figure comes gratis of Milliman, a benefits consulting group. A base-model Toyota Camry… the typical family’s most-popular make? It costs $22,055.
[Read more...]There’s nothing like a little mean reversion to start your day…
The Japanese Nikkei fell flat on its face overnight. Investors looking for an excuse to take profits received just that in the form of soft Chinese manufacturing numbers. That’s all it took for traders to mash the “sell” button…
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Cooking the Gold Books
We got a small, if bitter, taste of gold’s “Zero Hour” in the second half of April.
Either that, or the world’s largest banks engineered a takedown of gold for the purpose of staving off Zero Hour… for now.
As you’ll recall from these pages in March, “Zero Hour” is the name we give to the moment when the price of real, physical gold in your hand starts to break away from the quoted price on the commodities exchanges.
[Read more...]Click for detailed story