The Globe & Mail (Canada) – The obsessive life of bond guru Bill Gross One Sunday evening last year, Bill Gross was settling down in front of the television to watch some football when his wife’s cellphone rang. “I’ve had a beer and a half – that’s as far as I go – but I’m… Continue reading Drunk Bill Gross Tells Geithner What To Do
Costs of renting a studio of around 560 square feet in the tower are down to Dh90,000 a year, according to property broker Better Homes. Gulfnews.com – Burj Khalifa sees a further drop in apartment rents A studio costs Dh90,000 per year, according to top property agent Rents for apartments in the world’s tallest tower… Continue reading The Biggest Real Estate Project Bust In History?
The Wall Street Journal – Big Win for a Big Bear Bridgewater’s returns, impressive in almost any year, come as average hedge-fund returns have totaled 4.8% this year through September, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. Macro funds on average were up 3.5% through September. A possible risk to Bridgewater’s thesis is that the economy… Continue reading Making Money Being Bearish
The New York Times – Want a Big Raise? Get a Wall St. Job The government reported this week that the real wage and salary income of finance industry employees based in Manhattan rose nearly 20 percent in the first quarter of this year. That surge helped make Manhattan the fastest-growing county in the United… Continue reading Working On Wall Street
The New York Times – Big Problem for Banks: Due Process Earlier this week, Bank of America, the nation’s largest consumer bank, reported its third-quarter earnings. It was a very good quarter; putting aside an accounting charge — a very large, $10.4 billion accounting charge, admittedly — the bank reported $3.1 billion in profits. It… Continue reading The Mortgage Foreclosure Mess
New York Times – Nations Agree on Need to Shrink Trade Imbalances Representatives of the world’s largest economies, meeting in South Korea, reached tentative agreement early Saturday on the need to rein in trade imbalances, as part of an American-brokered compromise on calming exchange-rate tensions that have threatened to disrupt the uneven global recovery. The… Continue reading Trade
Market Watch – The gold bubble isn’t here — just yet Soaring prices fuel talk, but history says otherwise As gold prices soar, we’re starting to hear rumblings that it’s in a bubble. That’s not surprising, given its performance. The yellow metal has catapulted from a rock-bottom low of around $250 an ounce back in… Continue reading The Gold Bubble
Bloomberg.com – Pound Faces Pain as Cameron Cuts Send King to Printing Press The only major currency rivaling the dollar’s decline since July is the pound, and foreign-exchange strategists say the worst is yet to come for Britain’s legal tender. Sterling has depreciated 6.4 percent against a basket of the nine other most-traded currencies, including… Continue reading The Pound
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We last addressed the topic of foreign holdings of agency securities in a September 29 post titled “Are The Chinese Responsible For The Divergence In Fannie And Freddie Rates?” Since this last post, foreign central bank holdings of agency securities have continued to drop. Now at $733.38 billion, this is the lowest level of foreign… Continue reading Foreigners Continue To Drop Agency Securities
Zero Hedge (blog) – Goldman Advises Clients To Front Run The Fed Via POMO On the interplay between the FED and STOCKS: Since Sept 1 – when QE was becoming a mainstream focus – if you only owned S&P on days when the Fed conducted Open Market Operations (in US Treasuries), your cumulative return is… Continue reading POMO and Market Returns, Yes It Matters!
BusinessWeek – Cover: Mortgage Mess: Shredding the Dream The foreclosure crisis isn’t just about lost documents. It’s about trust—and a clash over who gets stuck with $1.1 trillion in losses Wall Street’s unspoken strategy has been to kick mortgage losses down the road until an economic recovery reinflates the housing market. The faulty-foreclosure crisis has… Continue reading Does The Foreclosure Mess Matter For The Rest Of The Economy?