Bloomberg.com – Corporate Jets Often First Thing to Go After Leveraged Buyouts Note to chief executive officers weighing that leveraged-buyout offer: You may have to give up the corporate jet. Companies bought by private-equity firms are 32 percent less likely to have a jet in the three years after the deal closes than in the… Continue reading The Horror Of LBOs
Comment Tuesday Jim Bianco appeared on Bloomberg TV with Tom Keene talking about the possibility of QE3 and the markets. To view the interview click on the picture below. To view any of our recent interviews click here. Real Time Economics (WSJ Blog) – Fed’s Lockhart: QE2 Should Be Completed The Federal Reserve should complete… Continue reading What Comes After QE2?
Reuters – U.S. apartment vacancies fall in Q1, rents edge up Reis Inc’s quarterly report showed the vacancy rate dropped to 6.2 percent in the first three months of the year, down from 6.6 percent in the fourth quarter. It was the steepest fall since the commercial real estate research firm began tracking the market… Continue reading Rents Are Going Higher, Will Core Inflation Follow?
<Click on chart for larger image> The Wall Street Journal – BOJ Puts Up $11.73 Billion for Rebuilding The Bank of Japan on Thursday introduced a special lending facility that makes cheap funds available for banks in areas affected by the country’s recent earthquake. With the economic impact of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami… Continue reading The Bank of Japan
CNBC.com – Greenberg: Is the Silver More Valuable in a Silver Closed-End Fund or a Silver ETF? An increasingly hot topic in some circles as silver prices soar: Whether the Sprott Physical Silver Trust, a silver closed-end fund better known as the PSLV , should be worth more — bar for bar — than the… Continue reading GLD & SLV: Who Owns The Bullion?
The Financial Times – Silver price indicates level of speculative froth Gold and its silver pilot fish are at record and 31-year highs, respectively. Apart from people buying jewellery when they feel flush, the two other main demand drivers for gold are negative factors: rampant inflation and political strife. Not good for stocks. Now it… Continue reading Speculative Froth In Silver?
The Wall Street Journal – The Fed Should Consider a ‘Bad Bank’ One of the Fed’s recent errors was increasing the money supply by buying more than $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities as part of its “quantitative easing” policy. Its hefty balance sheet now threatens to finance further inflationary increases in the money supply. How… Continue reading The “Good Bank/Bad Bank” Idea Returns
Real Time Economics (WSJ Blog) – Fed Would Stay Open Amid Government Shutdown As the battle over the U.S. budget threatens to leave the government without money starting from Friday, there’s at least one key agency that would not be affected: the Federal Reserve. But its job may be complicated if other parts of the… Continue reading The Government Shutdown
<Click on chart for larger image> The Wall Street Journal – Portugal Bailout May Reach $129 Billion A European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout package for Portugal could total as much as €90 billion ($128.98 billion) and be paid out in phases before and after the country’s June 5 elections, a senior minister from… Continue reading Portugal & Contagion
The Wall Street Journal – Concerns Emerge as a Fed Rate Falls The fed-funds rate has suffered other precipitous declines in recent years, typically for a day or two at the end of quarters, but it usually snaps back. This time it has stayed low, echoing other short-term lending markets, where a host of factors… Continue reading The Fed Funds Rate