Confessions Of A Gloomy Gus
I have recently been accused of being a paid up member of the gloom and doom club. Well, actually accused might be too strong; informed is probably more accurate. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how these weekly missives might be perceived but based on recent feedback the perception out there seems .. read more
Financial Impulsion
You’ve probably read about financial repression in which governments or their agents interfere in the market in an effort to reduce debt. The most obvious recent example is the Fed and other central banks interfering in bond markets and suppressing interest rates. While these central banks generally justify this act on the grounds that it .. read more
Is Cyprus A Tipping Point?
Could tiny Cyprus with a population of less than 1 million be the undoing of the Euro experiment? It seems surreal to think that such a tiny country, representing less than a quarter percent of Euro GDP could be the trigger for the unraveling of an entire continent’s currency but it is often small countries .. read more
Companies Spending Money Badly
Stock buybacks hit a record last month according to this post from Cardiff Garcia at FT Alphaville quoting a Birinyi Associates post: We recorded $117.8 billion in buyback authorizations during the month of February, representing a 103% gain over the same period in 2012 ($118 bln vs. $68 bln). .. read more
State Of The Union
The President will deliver the State of the Union address Tuesday night. He will probably offer a laundry list of programs that he’d like to spend more money on and the Republicans will respond with a laundry list of reasons why the President’s list is a bad idea. The President will say that he intends .. read more
Buy Low, Sell High
Buy low, sell high. It is one of the most abused of market axioms and says both quite a lot and nothing at all. Of course you need to buy assets when they are cheap and sell them when they are dear but low and high aren’t exact terms and are, like beauty, amorphous qualities .. read more
Batten Down The Hatches
Back in November I wrote a weekly commentary that I called Looking For Silver Linings. The market had been taking a beating in the post election period and I wasn’t feeling particularly good about my forecasting skills. I had written a commentary just two weeks before arguing that the election really didn’t matter that much .. read more
Morons & Oxymorons
American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. That’s the title of the recently passed legislation to avoid the so called “fiscal cliff”. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It isn’t a true oxymoron since that term is generally reserved for things that are surprisingly true and paradoxical but it certainly fits the more common, .. read more
