Daily

I continue to believe that US share prices are based on a benign if not an optimistic view of the macro environment. If we see anything less, I believe US shares will be the ones to pull back most as opposed to European ones.

The Fed is in a tough spot. They want to do more. Things are unravelling in Europe and the slowdown in Brazil, India and China is well-advanced. While the jobs outlook has improved in the US, there is still considerable slack in labor…

There has been a lot of back and forth in the financial and economics blogosphere about the centrality of financial institutions and their facilitation of private debt accumulation leading up to the Great Financial Crisis. It seems to me…

The German data is still looking rather weak. I saw some numbers out of Germany that showed business confidence was rising. I don't know why.

I had intended my commentary here to be on US interest rates but i have already written that (silver level) post. So I will refer you there. Instead, I will mention Europe again because the links are filled with European stories.

This is a day of the general strike in Spain, so a large number of the links below are about Spain and the situation there, in both English and Spanish.

This one's short today as I am running out of time. I posted earlier regarding Bill Gross' comments about the Fed doing a mortgage-backed QE3. There's nothing fundamentally off about this call. But we really aren't there yet as it is wholly…

Some thoughts on defined benefit and defined contribution in today's world of negative real rates plus today's links

Last week, I wrote a bit more on my prediction of margin compression in the US and how Apple fits in the weekly newsletter. This story in today's links from the Washington Post was really good on that with regard to Apple.

The daily links and commentary is a bronze-level post. Quick thoughts: This past week made it abundantly that Europe is slowing fairly dramatically. A number of countries have entered recession. I have been saying since October that Europe…