The majority of investors that are attracted to gold are those that view the metal as real money. Money is a supposed to be a limited, scarce object that is not subject to the whims of human interference. But, to the dismay of true money believers, gold long ago lost the war of the modern evolution of the nexus between [...]
With today’s slight downward revision to Q1 ’13 GDP, apologies to Eric Rosengren, comes the preliminary estimate of corporate profits. Corporate earnings estimated here by the BEA are sometimes quite different from those estimated by Standard & Poors, for example. One major difference is the S&P focus on earnings per share, where the BEA is only interested in pure income. [...]
When even Eric Rosengren, Boston Fed President, is thinking about “tapering” you know something is a tad askew in FOMC-land. Again and again, these doves (including Charles Evans at the head of the Chicago Fed branch) had advocated the heaviest of hands of monetary intervention. QE 3 & 4 could not have been big enough for this cabal. Now in [...]
The talk of tapering QE has been incessant the past few weeks, no doubt playing a huge role in the volatility of the US Treasury market (as if there is some competition with the JGB market). Yesterday’s dramatic selloff has been absurdly linked to consumer confidence numbers and “improving” economic fundamentals, as if bond rates suddenly care about improving consumer [...]
I have been espousing a theory that QE-steriods in Japan has led to a decline in liquidity conditions for Japanese banks. That, in turn, may have been partially responsible for the most recent downturn in the price of gold. It may or may not have been a factor in the gold smash of April, but at this point it cannot [...]
Since it has been a slow week in terms of economic data, we can take some time to review corporate earnings season. The current estimate for Q1 2013 operating earnings on the S&P 500 (with 465 companies reporting so far) is for 6.2% Y/Y growth. That is up from -2.44% and -5.10% the previous two quarters. The growth has again [...]
The volatility in yen markets, both stocks and credit, continued again with wild swings seemingly everywhere. The Bank of Japan also continued to promise measures aimed restoring calm, including outright purchases of ¥600 billion ($6 billion) JGB’s in the 5-10 year maturity range and an additional ¥300 billion ($3 billion) of maturities beyond 10-years. The focus remains on nominal yields, [...]
Despite repeated assurances that the Bank of Japan would do whatever monetarisms it could to calm the Japanese bond markets, the persistent stain of selling pressure has not abated, rather it has increased. While to this point it had been relatively benign in the most obvious correlations, the Nikkei has risen steadily throughout, for example, there have been signs of [...]
I delayed posting in its regular Sunday spot to see if there were any additional pressures in gold prices over the weekend. Sure enough, gold sold off again seemingly in tandem with Japanese financial events. Both gold and silver were sold hard right at the open, bringing in a morning London fix well below the April lows – before rallying [...]
Christopher Rad of Cedar Park, Texas, was just sentenced to 71 months in prison for executing a technologically advanced update of a very old stock scam. Mr. Rad enlisted the aid of hackers and spammers to spread rumors and interest equity investors in various stocks, including RSUV, QRVS, VSHE, SVXA, and ASIC. The scheme involved infecting other computers with a [...]
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