The Wall Street Journal – Fed Eyes Financial System’s Weak Link Risks posed by short-term funding have long been a concern at the Fed, and a string of recent public statements suggests the central bank may soon take aim at... Read More
The Financial Times – IMF denounces US fiscal policy The International Monetary Fund denounced the tightening of US fiscal policy as ?excessively rapid and ill-designed?, saying it will knock as much as 1.75 percentage points off growth this year. In... Read More
The Washington Post – Meet Dylan, the day trader I first recall seeing Dylan Collins years ago on the basketball court of my son?s junior high school, 6-feet-plus of gangly adolescence with a wild head of hair and an easy,... Read More
Reuters.com – Hype over ‘fiscal cliff’ may spawn drinking game The phrase “fiscal cliff” may not be ubiquitous yet, but some on Wall Street are saying they already feel a bit punch drunk whenever they hear someone talk about the... Read More
Comment In the post above we pointed out the decline in NYSE stock volume. Given the nearly ubiquitous bearish opinion of bonds by economists, is Treasury volume following suit? The chart below shows ICAP’s measure of trading volume of bills,... Read More
The Wall Street Journal – Jon Hilsenrath: Fed Official Calls for Bond Buying Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, called on the Fed to launch an aggressive, open-ended bond buying program that the central bank would... Read More
MarketWatch.com – Dow headed below 10,000 as cyclical bear begins Commentary: Technical pattern suggests market will fall into next year A strange technical pattern chronicled here in June suggests that the stock market still has unfinished business to the downside.... Read More
Bloomberg.com – Caroline Baum: Only Fed Ensures Inflation Won’t Happen Here Consumers expect inflation of 3.2 percent in the next five-to-10 years. Investors expect 2.8 percent. Who?s right? And why should we care? We don?t know the answer to the... Read More
The Wall Street Journal – Fed Fires $600 Billion Stimulus Shot The Federal Reserve, in a dramatic effort to rev up a “disappointingly slow” economic recovery, said it will buy $600 billion of U.S. government bonds over the next eight... Read More
Bloomberg Businessweek – Dow ?Super Boom? to Send Gauge to 38,820, Hirsch Says The Dow Jones Industrial Average will surge to 38,820 in an eight-year ?super boom? beginning in 2017, according to Jeffrey A. Hirsch, editor in chief of the... Read More
The Wall Street Journal – Credit Ratings Now Optional, Firms Find Some debt issuers are finding they don’t need credit ratings. The last few months have seen a handful of prominent companies selling bonds or structuring complex securities without credit... Read More
Comment The amount of bad news that Goldman is generating with its record earnings is incredible. We cannot remember a company that has received so much scorn for making money. The Economist – Is Wall Street back to normal? Keeping... Read More
Wired – Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall StreetA year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists?even Wall Street quants?have received the... Read More
<Click on chart for larger image> Bloomberg.com – Mark Gilbert: Bailouts Prove Pale Substitutes for Market TrustThe gyrations in money-market rates and their disconnect with the monetary-policy intentions of central banks lend credence to the idea that a shadowy cabal... Read More
The New York Times – Ben Stein: Tattered Standard of Duty on Wall StreetNow, we have the collateralized mortgage obligations and their attendant losses in the subprime mortgage mess. The problem is a familiar one: basic hocus-pocus about what the... Read More