How odd is this economy? Two economic reports from last week, attempting to measure essentially the same thing, reported results that were so different they could be about two different countries. At 9:45 Wednesday morning, S&P Global reported their US Services PMI for July as 47.3 versus June's 52.7, a sudden and large one-month drop. When they reported the preliminary [...]
The emphasis of QE in terms of “portfolio effects” and interest rate “stimulus” is to visit upon the entire curve what monetary policy has done in the past in only the shorter maturities. So the evolution of monetarism under activism and interest rate targeting is to bring the entire curve down whereas before it was content to intrude only in [...]
Henry Hazlitt once wrote that, “it is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths.” I have come to wonder how far that might have penetrated, disabling so many of the tools in which any “good” economists, or even investors, may use to act. Without the free [...]
Herb Stein was an economist that drew the unenviable task (though I don’t think he saw it as such) of being chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He was a man who knew imbalance up close and personal. To that end, he once quipped, “Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go [...]
With so much talk about bubbles resurfacing lately, it’s worth an attempt to try to draw out exactly what a stock bubble looks like. There is little dispute about the bubble nature of the dot-com era, but the market has drastically changed in its appearance and structure beyond just Greenspan’s exuberant creation. In this instance it is more than just [...]
The ISM Manufacturing reports for January and February 2013 looked to be showing a noticeable rebound in manufacturing activity after some rather dicey months in the second half of 2012. I posited that this rebound was largely inconsistent with broader data (notably durable goods and factory orders) and explained them in the context of a potential inventory cycle heading into [...]
Some good results from Big Blue in an extremely tough environment. Across the board there was strength in the key areas, including 80% growth in cloud computing (a segment we want to see IBM as a leader). In terms of numbers, EPS growth was 10% for the full year, to $14.37, while net profits rose 5% (the difference is the [...]
And so another year has passed into the history books - the older I get, the faster they seem to go - and investors must again try to position their portfolios for a profitable year. It hasn't been easy to do the last few years and this year promises to be just as challenging. The usual suspects that made last [...]
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