Cheers went up from the real estate industry this morning when the Standard & Poor?s/Case Shiller data was released. It showed the first year-on-year increases in prices since 2006. Calls went out from real estate agents around the country announcing that the bottom was in and that you better buy now before prices shoot up.
?Central banks can do whatever they want. But there is no monetary policy powerful enough to prevent the U.S. from going into recession in the first six months of next year if the fiscal cliff happens,? said strategist, Dan Greenhaus.
I can?t tell you how many times I have received a call from the Joint Chiefs of Staff asking ?if country ?A? attacks country ?B? what is the effect on country ?Q? and ?Z?? After all, there is a pretty short list of those monitoring the global macro economy for 40 years with direct experience
?The strength of the Army must be credible enough to keep the knuckleheads abroad from miscalculating and instigating conflicts which they can?t win,? said Army Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno.
One of my best calls of the year was to plead with readers to avoid gold like the plague, periodically dipping in on the short side only. The barbarous relic has been in a bear market since it peaked at $1,922 an ounce at the end of August last year. Gold shares have fared much
I was researching comparative Asian wage data the other day and was astounded with what I found. Textile workers earn $2.99 an hour in India (PIN), $1.84 in China (FXI), and $0.49 in Vietnam (VNM). This is an 18-fold increase in labor costs from $0.10 an-hour since Chinese industrialization launched in 1978. This compares to
I strongly urge readers of this letter to log on to Amazon and buy a copy of Options for the Beginner and Beyond by W. Edward Olmstead. Options contracts offer investors a wonderful instrument for minimizing risk, while maximizing the upside, and I am going to recommend many more such strategies in the future. So,
?There?s been a lot of lost face in asset allocation over the past five years. Who would have thought that government bond yields could have gone so low?? said Michael Turner, a strategist at Aberdeen Asset Management.
I certainly hope you took my advice to load your portfolio with corn and gold and to dump your equities five years ago. What? You didn?t? Then you have almost certainly suffered on the performance front. According to data compiled by my former employer, the Financial Times, corn was the top performing asset class since
The decision by BHP Billiton, one of the world?s largest producers of copper, to postpone its planned $20 billion expansion of its Olympic Dam mine is sounding alarms about the near term state of the global economy. It is telling us that China is slowing faster than we thought, that demand for base metals is