<Click on graphic for larger image> The Reformed Broker – Josh Brown: The Relentless Bid’s impact on volume and volatility Earlier this year, I explained why the market has been behaving as it has in my Relentless Bid post. The gist of it was that Wall Street firms are more fee-driven than transactional commission-driven than… Continue reading Passive Investing
<Click on graphic for larger image> Bloomberg News @BloombergNews OPEC is meeting less frequently and having a smaller effect on prices
CNBC – Singapore man wins Buffett lunch with $2.17M bid A Singaporean man will pay $2,166,766 to have lunch with Warren Buffett, the fourth biggest-ever winning bid in an annual charity auction. A representative of the San Francisco-based Glide Foundation, which gets 100 percent of the profits from the sale, identified the winner as Andy… Continue reading Buffett Rebounds
The Wall Street Journal –U.S. Adds 217,000 Jobs; Unemployment Rate Steady at 6.3% Report Shows Steady Gains in Labor-Market Recovery The U.S. economy added jobs at a steady clip in May, providing renewed evidence that the five-year-long recovery accelerated this spring. Nonfarm employment advanced a seasonally adjusted 217,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday.… Continue reading Employment In Pictures
<Click on chart for larger image> Comment The chart above shows deposits at the ECB totaled 32.673 billion euros as of yesterday. Deposits spiked to over 800 billion euros in 2012 when the ECB was doing its earlier versions of LTROs and sterilized purchases. But, now the negative deposit rate (-0.10%) will affect very little.… Continue reading Negative Interest Rates
Bloomberg.com – What Happens When the Economy Baffles Economists? Other top macroeconomists put the problem even more starkly. Harvard’s Greg Mankiw said this in 2011: After more than a quarter-century as a professional economist, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about the economy. Indeed, the area of economics… Continue reading Can Economists Forecast?
The New York Times – Bond Rally Is Squeezing the Trading at Big Banks Wall Street’s biggest firms this year made an extraordinary wager that they probably now regret. Investment banks typically hold tens of billions of dollars of Treasury bonds on their balance sheets, enormous positions that can create trading profits if the prices… Continue reading Will Lower Yields Cause A Broker To “Blow Up?”
The Financial Times – Fed’s easy money has disconnected markets from the real economy Is it time to sound the alarm over levels in the credit or equity markets? When $750m in loans for the purchase of Electronic Funds Source was being arranged in late May, private equity executives who follow such things knew that… Continue reading The Federal Reserve & Bubbles
Real Time Economics – Fed’s Kocherlakota: U.S. Economy Needs Low Rates For Years To Come Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Narayana Kocherlakota said Thursday he believes the central bank will need to keep interest rates very low for a long time to come, even though that means the financial system will be haunted by… Continue reading Low Rates Forever!
Bloomberg.com – Home Price Gains of 20% Vanish as Hottest Markets Cool None of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas had increases of more than 20 percent in residential asking prices last month — the first time in almost two years that’s happened, San Francisco-based Trulia Inc. (TRLA) said in a report today. That compares… Continue reading No More Booming Housing Markets
Pimco – William H. Gross: Time (and Money) in a Cellphone Investment Conclusions The profiting by it is the hard part. With “The New Neutral” real and nominal interest rates, savers and investors are effectively being “taxed” in order to benefit debtors. As mentioned in last month’s Investment Outlook, there are ways to fight back, most… Continue reading Bill Gross Speaks