Archive - Jul 28, 2010 - Blog entry

While I tremendously respect David Rosenberg, his article on Wednesday on inflation and deflation is a confusing mishmash of Keynesian ideas which are clearly wrong. But in the end, despite his struggle with concepts, he may have the market timing right.

While some industry participants are heralding the recovery in commercial real estate, other experts warn that this is a false recovery and it's too early for such proclamations...

A little while back, a Fed Economist by the name of Kartik Athreya, wrote a piece urging the public to only listen to economists who have PhDs from top level universities when searching for economic insights. Obviously this paper was a lot of fun for me to read. So I thought I’d present some thoughts on Mr. Athreya and the group of “experts” he represents

Back in April investor bullishness was at extremes. Consequently, Wall Street ramped stocks first upwards (the usual predilection) to shank the puts… only to swiftly reverse the action in the middle of the week to shake out the calls. This whole system occurs courtesy of the Federal Reserve which openly and blatantly pumps the market on options expiration week. I’ve shown the below chart before. It’s staggering that no one in Congress or any of the regulators actually bother following up on this. How much more obvious does Bernanke need to get?

Unbelievable ...

Another well timed report from the CBO. This time they crap on those who have been advocating sustaining the Bush tax cuts. Funny thing is, if we do eliminate those tax cuts we are in for a hell of a recession come January. Is that a no win?

As the prospects for a double dip recession in the US seem to increase by the day, just about every bearish market commentator has his or her reasons why we should beware the triumphant return of the Great Recession. Even though I am not usually one to follow the herd, in this care I figured I might as well join the party and discuss my 5 favorite reasons a double dip may be upon us.

You may have heard from the media lately that President Obama hates business, despises businessmen, and is derailing the economic recovery with his anti business policies. A close examination of the hard data delivers a different conclusion. Is Obama actually a closet pro-business president?

Markets in a Flash

· Asian equity markets closed up across the board overnight posting strong gains. The Nikkei 225 was up + 2.70%, while the Shanghai Index was up +2.26%.

· European equity markets started the day positive but at the European lunchtime the markets had fallen into negative territory. The FTSE 100 was down more than -0.25%.

Now we know how those banks were able to post improving credit metrics last quarter!