United States

US elections Just to follow up on yesterday’s two posts, exit polling data from Tuesday confirm what I was saying about disenchantment with the U.S. economy despite the positive headlines. 58% of those casting ballots said they were…

In my last post on what the US midterm elections mean, I wrote that the election was a referendum on the President’s leadership and that he had failed that referendum. It is not the President’s policies per se that have caused voter…

The US mid-term elections have just ended as a major victory for the Republican Party. And while I don’t do politics, being in DC affords me a front row seat to what’s going on. Below is my take on what happened, why and what it means for…

The GDP and jobless claims numbers for the U.S. came out today and they confirm the continued solid pace of recovery that has taken shape since Q2 began. GDP growth came in at a 3.5% annualized and initial jobless claims were 287,000,…

I have a lot of threads to cover today. So let’s get right into it. New home sales. I want to start in the US first because the macro data backdrop is good. The first piece of data here is actually a bit soft and says that residential…

By Marc Chandler Drivers for the Week Ahead - This will be a busy week between stress tests and data releases, which markets have taken as positively- Market expectations have settled down, and the Fed is widely expected to announce the…

There are no big themes dominating the news today. So it is a perfect time to hit a couple of themes with an economic and market theme approach. Let’s talk banks, Japanese trade, the currency wars and deflation.

With financial markets tanking across the board, there is a whiff of panic and some people might be thinking that the next global financial crisis is already upon us. I don’t think this is the case. Certainly, the European sovereign debt…

I want to revisit two themes from my ten surprises post for a mini-post follow up to the last newsletter. The first theme is Treasury strength due to US economic weakness and the second is Spain outperforming Germany economically. Both of…

Even if there are good reasons to believe that the prolonged rally can continue for a little longer, there are equally good reasons to believe that the current equity bull market may end in tears. I am not predicting a repeat of 2008-09. A…