2012

The big new yesterday in the TMT world was T-Mobile's plans for 2013 which centered around a significant network upgrade, the end of subsidized handsets and the addition of Apple mobile products into the T-Mobile line-up. T-Mobile's…

This is a good interview with Hugh Hendry, who I always enjoy. It runs twenty minutes. Hugh Hendry, of Eclectica Asset Management, takes the long view on investing at The Economist's Buttonwood Gathering on October 25th 2012. He was…

According to recent estimates by Goldman Sachs, the US economy is already at stall speed, with GDP growth for Q4 expected to be an anemic 1%. Any further cuts to growth beyond this due to the fiscal cliff in 2013 would cause a recession.…

By Sober Look As discussed earlier (see post), US manufacturing data for November shows shrinking inventories. This is true for both the ISM survey ... ISM Inventories index (source: ISM) as well as the Markit PMI index: US Markit…

Apple is down 4% today for apparently no reason. There is no major news on Apple that would justify such a loss. Yet, over the past few months, the stock has been breaking down in an ominous way, usually for no reason other than heavy…

Quick post here to continue the theme of Christine Lagarde doing a complete makeover of the IMF. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported on an IMF staff paper that accepted capital controls as a necessary evil in specific cases, a sharp…

The real takeaway, however, is that the solution to the fiscal cliff problem involves some combination of tax increases and federal spending cuts. To the extent that at least some of it is front-loaded into 2013, which is likely, the result…

By Niels Jensen The Absolute Return Letter, December 2012 “It’s one thing to have an opinion on the macro, but something very different to act as if it’s correct.” -Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital Management It can be a frustrating, and…

Yesterday the ISM Manufacturing Report on Business came out and it showed a large decline in the US manufacturing sector. The headline PMI number of 49.5% means that the US manufacturing sector is below the 50% threshold that separates…

By Michael Pettis The big news in the past two weeks has been the slew of economic data suggesting that China has firmly turned the corner on its economic closedown. Growth is up, investment is up, and inflation is down. Here, for example,…