For some reason, everyone is taken aback because, as James Mackintosh at The Financial Times puts it, “Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the masters of the investment world, this week announced his retirement saying that he had become frustrated over the past three years with his inability to make outsized returns,� which makes me laugh my Huge Mogambo Butt (HMB) off at Mr. Druckenmiller, and laugh at hedge funds everywhere because, as Mr. Mackintosh reports, “the average macro fund had lost 1.2 per cent, after small gains last year, according to Hedge Fund Research. By contrast, global equities are down 5 per cent since January.�
[Read more...]How to Look for a Job
August 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Unemployment is stuck in a rut. One reason is the tendency to look backwards. Trillions of dollars have been spent (with no end in sight) to bail out financial institutions, homebuilders, and failing industries. The federal government is spending $787 billion on a rejuvenation plan: ARRA – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In the bill, $500 million is sequestered to metamorphose former credit-default swap salesmen into nurses and public health workers. Assuming the government wastes half of that money filling a new bureaucracy to administer the training, that still will be a lot of new nurses.
[Read more...]Lost in the Zeroes of Government Finance
May 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Henry CK Liu, writing at atimes.com, has, unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, apparently not been spending his days downloading pornography on his computer, and instead has looked at the sheer amount of money that was lost worldwide since October 31, 2007, when “the total market value of publicly traded companies around the world reached a high of $63 trillion. A year and four months later, by early March 2009, the value had dropped more than half to $28.6 trillion.”
[Read more...]China’s GDP: Slow Slowing Ahead
April 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment
China’s report of 11.9 percent GDP growth in the first quarter of 2010 – the fastest pace since late 2007 – has China watchers buzzing and looking for how (if at all) Beijing may respond.
CLSA, the influential brokerage based in Hong Kong, put out a research note today titled “Fast but Not Frightening.” It interprets the results as meaning that China’s domestic economy is fully recovered, and it revised its full-year GDP growth forecast to between 9 and 10 percent (from 8 to 9 percent). It foresees no big reaction from Beijing – instead just a continuation of the incremental tightening to make sure a dangerous housing bubble does not inflate and that the economy overall does not overheat.
[Read more...]GDP Doesn’t do This Slump Justice
March 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment
We’re all relatively familiar with Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, which measures the aggregate expenditure, or output of the economy. However, we tend to hear much less about its unloved cousin, Gross Domestic Income, or GDI, which tracks the economy’s total income.
A Federal Reserve economist, Jeremy Nalewaik, recently decided to look at the US downturn from a GDI perspective — which he determined to be more accurate — and the findings were much more negative than GDP indicates.
[Read more...]For Your Perspective, in 2009 Britain Has Sharpest Rate of Decline in 88 Years
January 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Falling far short of expectations, Britain’s economy didn’t strengthen much in the fourth quarter. So, for the whole year its GDP remained down 4.8 percent. It was the largest contraction the country has experienced since 1921.
According to the Times Online:
“Most economists had expected the country to turn the corner in the third quarter of the year, the three months to the end of September.
[Read more...]Why I’m Buying Stocks This Year – $SPX
January 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
By Frank Curzio
Right now, it's easy to make the case that sometime this year we'll be in the middle of a stock and credit bubble.
This potential bubble has its roots in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed early last year. It's the largest stimulus package in our nation's history. Billions in "free money" is being passed around to the infrastructure, technology, and energy sectors.
[Read more...]
Right now, it's easy to make the case that sometime this year we'll be in the middle of a stock and credit bubble.
This potential bubble has its roots in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed early last year. It's the largest stimulus package in our nation's history. Billions in "free money" is being passed around to the infrastructure, technology, and energy sectors.
[Read more...]
The War on Small Business
Today, we revisit a recurring theme: the assault on enterprise. It was the subject of our symposium in Vancouver in July. In this episode, we look at a particularly vulnerable segment of the economy: small businesses.
To help set the stage, let's look at some important stats from the Small Business Administration (SBA). Small businesses:
[Read more...]