The Wall Street Journal – Job Numbers Are Good, but Some Perils Loom At a time when every sign of economic progress seems to come with a “but,” February’s jobs report was something both welcome and rare: an unambiguously positive set of data…The question, then, isn’t whether the report was positive, but whether it signaled… Continue reading The Jobs Market
The Wall Street Journal – Jon Hilsenrath: Jobs Gains Unlikely to Alter Fed’s Course Friday’s jobs report showed that U.S. labor markets are making progress, but likely not enough to convince Federal Reserve officials that it’s time to pull back on the easy-money programs they’ve put in place to rev up economic growth and hiring.… Continue reading Does Hilsenrath Still Matter?
Bloomberg.com – Bernanke Provokes Mystery Over Fed Stimulus Exit When Ben S. Bernanke asserted last month that the Federal Reserve doesn’t ever have to sell assets, he raised questions about how the central bank can withdraw its record monetary stimulus without stoking inflation. The Fed may decide to hold the bonds on its balance sheet… Continue reading The Non-Exit Strategy
The Financial Times – A good engineer who knows his own limits At the start of this century the journalist Bob Woodward anointed Alan Greenspan as “the symbol of American economic pre-eminence”. Ben Bernanke must pray that he never attracts that kind of praise. As a student of business cycles, the current chairman of the… Continue reading How Will We Remember Bernanke?
<Click on chart for larger image> <Click on chart for larger image> The Wall Street Journal – Stock Market’s Rosy View of Earnings “Great quarter, guys!” If the entire stock market were a single company, the Q&A session on its latest earnings call would have started something like that. But it wasn’t just a bunch… Continue reading Earnings
The Wall Street Journal – Preparing for Day When Rates Rise “Don’t fight the Fed” has been a market mantra for the past four years. But some bond investors are starting to lace on their gloves. Figuring that the Federal Reserve won’t be able to keep a lid on interest rates forever, large money managers… Continue reading Your Daily Installment In Bond Hate
The Wall Street Journal – Fisher and Rosenblum: How to Shrink the ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’ Banks The return of marketplace discipline and effective due diligence of banking behemoths is long overdue. We offer a modest proposal to level the playing field: First, we would roll back the federal safety net—deposit insurance and the Federal Reserve’s discount window—to… Continue reading Bringing An End To “Too Big To Fail”
<Click on chart for larger image> The Financial Times – M&A that benefit investors are needed Dealmaking is back, to the sound of much celebration. A few megadeals to start the year confirm a picture in which mergers and acquisitions are rising steadily, even in Europe, after a dreadful 2012. This is good news for… Continue reading M&A Activity
The Financial Times – Europe’s repo market shrinks 12% Europe’s repo market, the main source of short-term funding for banks, contracted last year, suggesting that risk-averse banks are relying on the cheap loans supplied by the region’s central banks rather than lending to each other. The total value of outstanding European repurchase, or repo contracts… Continue reading Europe’s Shrinking Repo Market
Zero Hedge (Blog) – Intrade Out – Online Betting Service Shuts Down Just a few short months from the CFTC’s initial ‘enquiries’ into Intrade (and the election HFT malarkey), the online ‘prediction’ site appears to done. To Our Customers: With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately… Continue reading RIP Intrade
Comment Yesterday we hosted a conference call titled “The Economy, The Markets And Government Shutdown.” If you missed it: Audio [audio:https://www.biancoresearch.com/bianco/SubscriberArea/503842-674290.mp3|titles=Conference Call] [pageview class=”PDFViewer” url=”https://www.biancoresearch.com/bianco/wp-content/plugins/PDFViewer/plugin.php?id=118″] [hana-flv-player video=”https://www.biancoresearch.com/bianco/SubscriberArea/030713.flv” width=”600″ height=”495″ description=”” player=”3″ autoload=”false” autoplay=”false” loop=”false” autorewind=”true” splashimage=”https://www.biancoresearch.com/bianco/wp-content/themes/twentyten/images/splash.jpg” /] Comment Jim Bianco was on Bloomberg TV yesterday discussing the markets. To view the interview the interview, click… Continue reading The Economy, The Markets And Government Shutdown