My early morning reads:
• Stung by Losses, Main Street Investors Fail to Notice Market’s Rebound (Businessweek)
• High-Speed Trading in the Spotlight (WSJ)
• Eisinger: Distortion in Tax Code Makes Debt More Attractive to Banks (DealBook)
• The Tyranny of Algorithms (WSJ) see also Meet the New Boss: Big Data (WSJ)
• FDIC Two-fer:
…..-Big Bank Execs Just Don’t Get It: FDIC’s Hoenig (American Banker)
…..-Sheila Bair and the bailout bank titans (Fotune)
• Hedge Fund Giant Louis Bacon’s Bold Mission To Save The American West (Forbes)
• JPM Two Fer:
……-JPMorgan’s mortgage-backed migraine (Reuters)
……-JPMorgan Said to Break Moody’s Lock on Commercial-Mortgage Bonds (Bloomberg)
• Project S.H.A.M.E.: Megan McArdle, a Covert Republican Party Activist Trained by the Billionaire Koch Brothers (Naked Capitalism)
• Newsweek: Is Asking Inane Questions the Future of Journalism? (American Prospect)
• Popular Atomics: Periodic Table Is New Touchstone of Geek Chic (WSJ)
What are you reading?
The debtors’ merry-go-round
Source: Economist
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.
The markets have more than doubled since the low, fundamental valuation metrics are in the upper quintile of historical ranges, and we are almost finished with a Preseidential Election Year which is often the tail end of the good part of the market cycle.
Why are we now hearing beating drums berating small investors for not being in the market and a big marketing push to get them to go in at high levels? Where was the push three years ago when the money was there to be made? Instead, the marketers were touting the “safe investments”.
BTW – if they had their money in a well-diversified bond fund, they still did quite well even if they were not in the stock market. If they have been dollar-cost averaging into a good traget-date retirement fund in their 401k, they are also doing well.
George Will: Very low interest rates discourage saving, punish retirees living off interest-bearing assets and, George (Esther George, president of the KCFederal Reserve Bank) says, “incent people into riskier assets.” These include commodities, farm land (for the first time on record, prices of cropland in George’s district have risen more than 20 percent for two consecutive years) and equities. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke evidently thinks that driving up the stock market will quicken the animal spirits of the affluent 20 percent who own 93 percent of equities, and this “wealth effect” will spur economic activity, eventually benefiting others. So, the interest rates Barack Obama favors are a form of the trickle-down economics he execrates.
Barry, clicking thru on the Economist link to the (very nice) interactive version of that chart, I find the US figures for financial sector debt as a percent of the GDP to be incredible … in the literal sense of the term …
Am I nuts or is the Economist?
Or is this just a manifestation of the distortions induced by the 2008 FASB 157 rule changes?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/streetwise/lloyd-blankfeins-socialist-moment/article4555506/
I prefer the Zero Hedge version:
“On the other hand, the retail investor, older, wiser, and most importantly poorer, observing inexplicable and unpunished daily flash crashes across the numerous ‘highly frequently traded’ asset classes, still recovering from a market in which everyone told him to buy only to see a 50% loss in months, with ever less disposable income, is no longer interested in said “wealth effect” proposition, or any other proposition premised on the artificial manipulation of the political construct once upon a time known as the market, no matter how many personal guarantees of perpetual QEasing the Chairsatan will hand out.”
‘What About That Whole Birth Certificate Thing?’ Romney Suggests To Staff
http://www.theonion.com/articles/what-about-that-whole-birth-certificate-thing-romn,29621/
Reading howardoark’s comment got me doing a little surfin’.
Lots of insightful stats here: Wealth, Income and Power by Professor G. William Domhoff
Larry Yun, the “Chief Economist” for the weasels at the ‘National Association of Realtors’, switches from being wrong about real estate and the housing market, to being wrong about inflation, in his reaction to Bernanke’s QE3 announcement:
“I don’t see any more meaningful decline from this point onward. In fact, there may be some higher mortgage rates coming around next year, if the quantitative easing leads to somewhat higher inflation rates.”
NBR
Rethinking Robert Rubin
http://goo.gl/0SYNh
suspect that the middle class is done with the stock market for now just like what happened to banks after the great depression. today we see all kinds of stories indicating that the stock market is nothing but a sham for any but a few favored few. but there is some thing the lack of income or wealth to it too. after all if you have spent the last 30 years going backwards one tends to be more pessimistic than optimistic about such things. besides the market is now rigged against you so dont play. unless you are forced to (in that .0205k at work for ‘retirement’)
On the subject of groups not paying taxes . . .
“The report, released in advance of a 2 p.m. hearing in Washington today, said Microsoft used transactions with subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, Ireland, Singapore and Bermuda to save at least $6.5 billion in taxes.”
Microsoft Avoided Billions in U.S. Tax, Senate Memo Says
http://goo.gl/KRBNk
That revolving door just never stops.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/20/tim-pawlenty-the-new-face-of-the-gop-wall-street-alliance/
• Stung by Losses, Main Street Investors Fail to Notice Market’s Rebound (Businessweek)
better known as fool me once shame on you fool me shame on me.
Wall has a great job of stealing trillions in taxpayer money to ramp the market up. Porblem is the fundamentals are AWFUL. Stimulus is gone and with the FED print $100 Billion a month…that is no way to run an economy. Housing is over priced, oil overpriced, government overpriced. Correction is coming…won’t be pretty
watched How Booze Built America, starring Mike Rowe, chronicled how alcohol shaped the early preUSA. It premiered last nite .. I went to get a link – but I get the feeling they are holding the real show for replay on Sep 23, 11:00 amET
.. it was 1/2 history 1/2 discovery channels .. fact of pilgrims on the Mayflower hit Plymouth for what was clean drinking water in the day ie: alcohol .. bar walls doubled as xyz .. interesting and presented with fun