financial news

The latest Spotify move is significant in terms of its mounting challenge to Pandora in the US. This is going to be a real problem for Pandora and I anticipate that it will not be able to justify its market cap any time soon.

Reports of a cool new product out of Nokia give investors some hope that the company's product palette can keep the loss-making company alive as its cash resources dwindle. My understanding is that the latest cuts at Nokia will include the…

Not a lot of links today. One link I did want to talk about was the Barron's Roundtable Midyear Update. It's largely the same cast it has been for a few years but for the past few years, the topics have been heavily macro instead of…

Many of Spain's largest companies are well-diversified, from Telefonica to Repsol to even banking giants like BBVA and Santander. In my view, these are quality companies negatively impacted by the headlines on Spain. For value investors…

The euro zone sovereign debt crisis is reaching the end of the line. Spain and Italy are both simply too big to be bailed out. Yet as we speak, the yields on Spanish and Italian 10-year bonds are soaring, Spain's reaching a record 6.807%.…

Two weeks ago I argued Europe is on the brink of something very big. But the Spanish deal is not it. After the deal, markets rallied initially but soon afterwards, Spanish and Italian sovereign bonds sold off and are at the still elevated…

The big news yesterday was that Ben Bernanke did not back up Janet Yellen's dovish commentary from the night before. Fed Chair Bernanke did say that the Fed was prepared to use unconventional measures to maintain an accommodative stance.…

The Martin Wolf piece about panic becoming all too rational fits very nicely with the macro case i made earlier today. He points to the private sector indebtedness and subsequent retrenchment as well as to the policy errors that have come…

This is a belated commentary for Friday. I have a lot of links on the global growth slowdown today but I covered this earlier saying Weak global economic data signal likelihood of global recession. I wanted to highlight Marshall Auerback's…

The euro zone continues to dominate the headlines, with both Spain and Greece on the verge of collapse. Ireland, however, has voted in a referendum today to decide whether it accepts the fiscal treaty that Germany has been pushing for in…