January 15, 2010 @ 11:40 am | Leading Indicators |
Can’t anybody run a bank anymore? I don’t mean an investment bank that makes its money from trading, managing stock and bond offerings, and inventing new financial instruments. That’s a good business these days for everybody from Bank of America (BAC) to JPMorgan...
January 15, 2010 @ 8:30 am | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
I think investors are worried about the wrong kind of crisis in China. Worry seems to focus on the possibility of an asset bubble and the change that it will burst sometime in the next two to three months. I’m more concerned about a slide into a crisis that will be an...
January 14, 2010 @ 3:49 pm | Leading Indicators |
Bad idea to run out of coal during a cold spell. But that’s exactly what’s happened to China’s utilities. Near panic spot buying has sent the price of thermal coal above $100 a metric ton for the first time in a year. China imported about 50 million metric tons of...
January 14, 2010 @ 1:06 pm | Leading Indicators |
Ouch, falling retail sales in December are a real disappointment to all those betting that they know how fast the economy will grow in 2010. Time to put a little more humility back in all our projections and admit that we still don’t know what the real growth trend...
January 14, 2010 @ 10:11 am | Leading Indicators |
Emerging market bonds reached investment grade for the first time ever last week on the January 8 upgrade of Turkey’s government bonds by Moody’s. The average credit rating for the 39 countries that make up the benchmark JPMorgan Embi Global Diversified Index moved up...
January 13, 2010 @ 3:31 pm | Leading Indicators |
So far it doesn’t look like the Chinese government is committed to ending financial speculation. Look at the mis-match between the amount of cash Beijing has pumped into its economy and the tiny steps it has taken recently to take money out of the financial system....
January 13, 2010 @ 10:45 am | Leading Indicators |
Good luck with that, Ford. Ford Motor (F) CEO Alan Mulally has signaled that the company will go hard after customers in the world’s developing economies with its new platforms for small and mid-sized cars. A new car built on the re-launched Fiesta platform and...
January 13, 2010 @ 9:23 am | Leading Indicators |
The war of words—and sometimes deeds—continues between China and the world’s biggest iron ore producers, BHP Billiton (BHP), Rio Tinto (RTP), Vale (VALE). The producers seem intent on freezing China out of the annual negotiations that set iron ore prices for the year...
January 12, 2010 @ 12:57 pm | Leading Indicators |
After the close on Monday January 11, Alcoa (AA) reported a loss of $277 million for the fourth quarter of 2009. Excluding special items, Alcoa earned a penny a share. The company turned free cash flow positive for the first time since June 2008 Evidence that the...
January 12, 2010 @ 10:09 am | COF, Leading Indicators, You May Have Missed |
As far as I know, there’s no financial-markets law saying that if some countries get a credit-rating downgrade, then others must get a credit-rating upgrade to keep the system in balance. But right now it seems to be working that way. The past year has brought...
January 11, 2010 @ 1:28 pm | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
China is now the biggest auto market in the world. In 2009 sales of passenger cars, buses, and trucks grew by 49% to a total of 13.6 million units. With U.S. sales falling 21% in 2009 to 10.4 million that pushed the United States to No. 2. Three things you should know...
January 11, 2010 @ 12:17 pm | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
The bond market is putting distance between European and U.S. government bonds. Yields on U.S. 10-year Treasury have climbed twice as fast as yields on similar German government bonds since the start of December, according to Bloomberg. The bonds had traded in sync...
January 11, 2010 @ 9:11 am | Leading Indicators |
A month later than the optimists hoped for but a quarter ahead of what pessimists feared in December  China’s exports recorded their first year-to-year increase in 14 months. The 17.7% growth in exports from December 2008 puts China on track to allowing its currency...
January 8, 2010 @ 3:43 pm | Leading Indicators |
People who don’t have jobs don’t run up their credit card balances. Not much of a surprise. But in November it added up to a record 14th straight monthly drop in credit card debt. Today, January 8, the Federal Reserve reported that credit-card debt fell by $13.7...
January 8, 2010 @ 2:12 pm | Leading Indicators |
So exactly when does a lot of debt for a country such as the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Greece or Italy become too much debt? The threshold is when government debt rises above 90% of national GDP, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argue in a...
January 8, 2010 @ 12:07 pm | Leading Indicators |
Hmmm, maybe, finally, a good idea on how to curb the worst excesses of Wall Street pay. Regulators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FIDC), the Financial Times reports, are talking about linking the amount that banks have to pay into the fund that provides...
January 8, 2010 @ 8:30 am | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
It’s one thing when it’s Greece or Portugal. A credit downgrade or warning for those two countries isn’t exactly headline news for most investors. For most of our portfolios these are peripheral markets. Ireland in trouble too? Yawn. Don’t own any Irish stocks. Italy?...
January 7, 2010 @ 4:28 pm | Leading Indicators, You May Have Missed |
Here’s the dilemma. Long-term emerging market stocks are going to beat stocks from the world’s developed economies like a drum. Everything right now points in that direction. Growth rates: For example, the United States looks likely to grow by 2% to 3% annually over...
January 7, 2010 @ 1:22 pm | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
Add Japan to the list of country’s counting on a weak currency to dig their economies out of a hole. On his first day in office new Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan lost no time in saying that he’d like a weaker yen. The Japanese currency is already down 9% from...
January 7, 2010 @ 10:30 am | Leading Indicators |
Good news (well, a little) and bad news in the unemployment numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor this morning. Although the number of workers filing initial claims for unemployment climbed in the week ended January 2 to 434,000 from 433,000 in the previous week,...
January 7, 2010 @ 9:21 am | Leading Indicators |
 China too. It’s not just the United Kingdom and the United States where turning off the stimulus cash faucet has the potential to take a bite out of the economy and financial markets in 2010.  In China the big question is What will happen to consumer spending on...
January 6, 2010 @ 3:41 pm | Leading Indicators |
The U.S. government releases its jobs figures tomorrow and Friday, January 7 and 8. Lucky economists aren’t groundhogs or they’d be scaring themselves back into their burrows for well more than six more weeks of unemployment winter. I’d call the mood on jobs and...
January 6, 2010 @ 12:56 pm | AAPL, Leading Indicators, QCOM |
There are two fronts in the increasingly bitter war being fought between Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG). And while the contest between the iPhone and Google’s Nexus One (and other Android phones) is getting most of the ink, it’s the apps battle that comes with the...
January 6, 2010 @ 10:30 am | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
Holy Karl Marx, Batman. China is set to introduce futures contracts on its stock market indexes. Perhaps in March right after the Communist Party’s annual congress, Bloomberg reports. China’s Financial Futures Exchange has been running mock trading in the contracts...
January 6, 2010 @ 8:30 am | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
Mark Mobius, the most experienced emerging markets investor I know of, is urging caution on emerging markets. The huge run up in asset prices on stock markets from Shanghai to Warsaw is bringing companies to market to sell stock in record amounts. And that makes...
January 5, 2010 @ 12:07 pm | Leading Indicators |
Stock markets staged a strong rally yesterday, January 4, boosted by strength in commodities and commodity stocks. The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index climbed 1.6% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.5%. Oil (West Texas Intermediate) climbed $2.15 a...
January 5, 2010 @ 8:30 am | Breaking News, Leading Indicators, PXD, You May Have Missed |
Buy and hold isn’t dead, but its DNA sure could use a bit of genetic engineering. Buy and hold was never intended as buy and forget, but a great bull market run like the one that stretched from 1982 to 2000 made it seem like all an investor had to do was buy and then...
January 4, 2010 @ 1:16 pm | Leading Indicators |
The U.S. dollar earned about a C+ in the decade from 1999 to 2009, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The dollar’s share of allocated global reserves had declined to 62% by the end of September 2009, according to the IMF. That was down from 71% at the...
January 4, 2010 @ 10:30 am | Breaking News, Leading Indicators |
It’s a desperate gamble but Japan’s Democratic Party government, headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, doesn’t have much choice. To break the hold of deflation on the Japanese economy, the country has to spend money—lots of money—it doesn’t have to stimulate an...
January 4, 2010 @ 8:47 am | Leading Indicators, You May Have Missed |
It’s January. Time to think about taking some profits? Or at least to settle in for a period when U.S. stocks as a whole don’t go much of anywhere. January ends the three month period that for more than 50 years has been on average the best part of the year for...