2014

With Black Friday behind us, it’s a pretty good time to do a check of market currents and what they mean. And despite my generally optimistic view of the US near-term economic landscape, a lot of what I am seeing now points to continued…

The latest batch of data points coming out of the global economy are a mixed bag. Some point to continued robust retail sales in the U.S. but other points show weakness in expected capital expenditure and hiring globally, while others show…

Right now, the global economy is slowing, with problems in Japan, China, Europe and the Emerging Markets. Only North American growth has remained strong as 2015 approaches. The dip in oil prices changes all of that. While a further fall…

Today, I want to highlight some of the best stories in the news today. US economy Let’s start off with the US, where the hiring of holiday workers is said to track very well with retail sales. In the lead up to the holidays, the…

Despite my upbeat view on the U.S., there are considerable headwinds to the global economy. We see this in the nexus of slowdowns in China and Europe and the decline in commodities, gold and oil which intersect with energy high yield bonds…

Last night, Japan’s GDP figures for Q3 came in much lower than expected. GDP fell an annualized 1.6% versus expectations for an annualized increase of 2.2%. This is as large a miss as you will see, and it calls into question the economic…

Japan seems to be heading deeper and deeper into a very risky experiment based on a misunderstanding about what the problem facing the country actually is.

I stole this title from the Wall Street Journal because that was takeaway #1 in their post on the 5 takeaways on eurozone GDP. It seems apt but what does it mean? For me it means that the eurozone is at stall speed, vulnerable to crashing…

The Germans are saying, “we want the euro and we want to be good European partners, but not on any terms. We will not be in a union that fosters ever-increasing levels of government debt.”

A month ago, I wrote a piece on zero rates, resource misallocation, and shale oil that warned of the potential negative impact that low oil prices could have on the funding for shale drillers and the potential contagion this drying up in…