Archive - Jul 2010 - Blog entry

How bad is it? We have no clue.

JP Morgan kicks the bank earnings season off with a disquieting thud, as we suspected.

Not even the Japanese want to buy their own stocks, with foreign institutions accounting for up to 60% of trading volume on a good day. Local investors would much rather buy emerging market funds, currency funds, bond funds, anything but their own equities. This explains the miserable 1.15% yield investors get on ten year JGB’s. A new kid has shown up in the neighborhood called China which has usurped its traditional role. A massive accumulation of debt and a thousand “bridges to nowhere.” Obama take note.

It's official. Illinois, the fifth most populous state in the U.S., has overtaken Iceland in the default risk category. Will other U.S. states follow?

[1] The S&P 500 meets key trendline resistance on day 55 of a Fibonacci time cycle as exponential moving averages cluster ... [2] daily, weekly and monthly support / resistance levels for the US Dollar ... [3] Crude Oil futures trace out a tricky wedge formation

Why isn't our economy recovering? I ask that question often and have written about it many times. Perhaps a better question is: what needs to happen in order to make our economy grow? I offer some solutions.

Canada's Public Sector Pension Investment Board has put a large portfolio of private equity commitments up for sale, in the latest evidence that a long-awaited boom in deal flow on the secondary market has arrived.

I'm not going to say I told you so, but Apple is on the verge of quickly losing its grip on what is, by far, its most profitable franchise…

Updated ...

"Surely, I'm missing something here, but all of this seems like reckless rope-a-dope in the tradition of Muhammad Ali in his best rope-a-doping days."

As the MSM picks up on what we have been telling you for a year and a half now... All is not well in Euro-banking land, despite what the ECB has been telling you.

We are face to face with the classic "who do you trust" situation, where the company who caused the problem is tasked with fixing it. With the full support of the authorities no less. Who can we believe? And should we?

Chaos ...

Don't be surprised if Microsoft is the one to pull to the lead of the smartphone wars! There's something to be said for being the de facto enterprise standard in productivity, a top server vender, the majority market share in browsers, and owning one of the top gaming platforms. Plus, now their motivated due to Apple and Google taking their lunch money.

They call the yellow metal the barbaric relic for a reason. Obama has not suddenly turned into a paragon of fiscal rectitude, and Ben Bernanke still has the keys to the printing presses. Politicians of both parties see the only way to win elections is to inflate. The output of gold has fallen by 12% annually for the past decade, compared to a doubling of production costs to $500/ounce. Barrick Gold (ABX) isn’t opening a new mine at 15,000 feet in the Andes because it likes the fresh air. (GLD), (UGL), (ABX).