My early morning reads:
• So basically April sucked (FT.com) see also May doesn’t have to be bad for stocks (Market Watch)
• The Approaching Reallocation Rally (The Street)
• WTF? One man Contrary Indicator Greenspan Says U.S. Stocks ‘Very Cheap’(Bloomberg)
• China’s Vanishing Trade Imbalance (NYT)
• Hussman: Release the Kraken (Hussman Funds)
• Bad Models Mistook Housing Bust for Dot-Com Bubble (Bloomberg) see also Why U.S. House Prices Won’t Recover (SmartMoney)
• Hope keeps people happy and healthy so dont always tell the truth (Core Economics)
• Furor Over Executive Pay Is Not the Revolt It Appears to Be (DealBook)
• Drivers Pay Secret Road Tax in $15 Billion for Car Repair (Bloomberg)
• The greatest films of all time (Chicago Sun Times)
What are you reading?
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Only 14 out of 37 risk assets had positive total returns for April
Source: FT Alphaville
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Really wish Greenspan would opine about equities to himself, and himself only.
LOL :-)
google images “Release the Kraken”
chihuahua in death grip with plush octosquid :-O
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
Greenspan is really tone deaf to the laughter he generates. This is the clearest statement I ever recall him making, normally every statement he makes is woven with 2,3,4 negatives, hard to tell Who is on first. This is pretty scary!
Drivers Pay Secret Road Tax in $15 Billion for Car Repair
Excessive wear and tear on roads is a direct result of promoting and increasing tax breaks to large vehicles like heavy SUV’s and Pick Up Trucks. In fact, the tax break for purchase of vehicles over 6000 pounds INCREASED for 2012.
When do we stop pretending the crew cabs in the grocery parking lot are used for ‘business’?
Marginal oil production costs are heading towards $100/barrel
…This indicates at what point it becomes uneconomic to produce oil, which would lead to production shut-ins…
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/05/02/983171/marginal-oil-production-costs-are-heading-towards-100barrel/
Amazon continues to branch out. Now producing TV shows.
http://allthingsd.com/20120502/amazon-gets-into-the-sitcom-business
I found this to be both surreal and insane. I wonder if Romney will distance him self from this guy or if he is using him as a proxy….
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/romneys-former-bain-partner-makes-a-case-for-inequality.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
Robert Reich
The Tinder-Box Society
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 13,338 Tuesday, it’s highest since December, 2007. The S&P 500 added 16 points. Wall Street will remember May 1 as a great day.
But most of these gains are going to the richest 10 percent of Americans who own 90 percent of the shares traded on Wall Street. And the lion’s share of the gains are going to the wealthiest 1 percent.
Shares are up because corporate profits are up, and profits are up largely because companies have figured out how to do more with less.
Payrolls used to account for almost 70 percent of the typical company’s costs. But one of the most striking legacies of the Great Recession has been the decline of full-time employment – as companies have substituted software or outsourced jobs abroad (courtesy of the Internet, making outsourcing more efficient than ever), or shifted them to contract workers also linked via Internet and software.
That’s why most of the gains from the productivity revolution are going to the owners of capital, while typical workers are either unemployed or underemployed, or else getting wages and benefits whose real value continues to drop. The portion of total income going to capital rather than labor is the highest since the 1920s.
Increasingly, the world belongs to those collecting capital gains.
…
http://robertreich.org/post/22204212722
SOP: yeah, but Peak Oil (like the rest of reality) is over and now it’s on to the next oil boom!
http://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2012/04/21/peak-oil-off-great-game-on/
Matthew Hulbert
“Peak oilers have had a pretty hard time lately. Not only have global unconventional finds flattened Hubbard’s ‘peak’, more and more conventional plays are cropping up. ‘Running out’? We have more than enough of the black stuff to incinerate ourselves several times over. Such supply side bounty has been well documented in the Americas – not just in the US and Canada, but across Latin America, offering a second pass at resource riches. Head all the way over to Australia, and you’ll see a dazzling display of unconventional technologies rapidly increasing kangaroo LNG production. The North Sea can squeeze out a few more drops; Europe can finally get it’s ‘energy sovereignty’ back from shale plays, all while the Arctic offers Russia untold oil riches. Anywhere you look, the narrative is the same. But just when we thought the global hydrocarbon map was complete, another serious player has cropped up, and it comes in the form of East Africa. This is the new African oil rush, and the race to secure regional riches between East and West is on. Nobody wants to lose: Peak oil is dead, the Great Game is back.”
(there’s more gushing about all the reserves of oil and natural gas and nothing about the consequences of its continued use)
We aren’t learning a thing – we continue to repeat the same mistakes until we kill ourselves and everything else apparently.
Mish discussing that same Greenspan piece who brings up his appearnce on the daily show five years ago where Greenspan admits the fallability of Fed prediction.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/05/contrary-indicator-alert-greenspan-says.html
Is Hussman a perma bear?
Public prices key to reducing derivatives risk-Gensler
Dow Jones
this is a tough statement
would turn me around to big gensler fan if he delivers
the buyer and seller booking massively different values at purchase is at the heart of fake asset pricing
while Gensler weaseled to me earlier on this at a luncheon, i would become a believer
Niall “Circular File” Ferguson’s right-wing prognosticstiins usually are proven wrong over the months and year, this one only took a day.
Ferguson says Storm Brewing between US and China on activist Chen
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/storm-brewing-between-washington-beijing-niall-ferguson-183523286.html
US, China Strike Deal very Activist.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304746604577379301935298194.html
A dozen years ago, Greenspan was forecasting a dire shortage of Treasury securities, as endless budget surpluses eventually resulted in all outstanding Treasuries being redeemed and not replaced. What a calamity!
Greenspan wasn’t just wrong. He was SPECTACULARLY, OFF-THE-CHARTS wrong. Even after 13 years as Fed chairman, he didn’t have the slightest clue about the business cycle. He had learned NOTHING since 1973, when he also forecasted a boom, just as the U.S. economy slid into the deep recession of 1974.
You’d think the imbecile would have the good grace to bear the shame of his boundless incompetence in dignified seclusion. But as long as the four-eyed fool insists on bloviating more nonsense which will further bury his post mortem reputation, we have a unique and unparalleled opportunity to profit by fading the advice of a certified ‘reverse Midas’ genius who — unique among mortals — is INFALLIBLY WRONG.
this may well be on the up and up, but it just smells a little funny:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-chesapeake-mcclendon-hedge-idUSBRE8410GG20120502
(Reuters) – As chairman and CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp, Aubrey McClendon has been a powerhouse in the vast U.S. natural gas market, directing the company’s multibillion dollar energy-trading operation and setting output targets for America’s second-largest producer.
Behind the scenes, a Reuters investigation has found, McClendon also ran a lucrative business on the side: a $200 million hedge fund that traded in the same commodities Chesapeake produces.
Agreed Mathman, we do not think about the consequences. The Commons is in big trouble and no one is looking after it. Just the opposite – we are now racing each other to extract and consume faster.
“Peak Oil (like the rest of reality) is over”
Yup. Looks like we are stuck with Surreality for a while ..
… Niall Ferguson, on his TV show promotion tour, says (as noted above) that the US and China will have real problems due to the Chen issue. but Chen gets a Fellowship and brings his family to the US.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17958429
Here he says that Obama will lead us into a 1931-style depression. Wrong!
http://ironiestoo.blogspot.com/2011/09/niall-ferguson-predicts-this-will-be.html
Here he says the US will have a deflationary bust. Wrong!
http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/niall-ferguson-predicts-us-fall-deflationary-bent/50366
Another right-wing attention whore, Niall Ferguson, pompous, pseudo, full of it. And I’m sorry for all of you right-wingers that invested based on his loosely-supported, stilted non-umentaries. Invest at your own peril when listening to someone afflicted with Histrionic Personality Disorder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder