Category Archive: Finance
The Latest Look At Long-Term Trends In Employment By Age Group
The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is a simple computation: You take the Civilian Labor Force (people age 16 and over employed or seeking employment) and divide it by the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (those 16 and over not in the military and or committed to an institution). The result is the participation rate expressed as […]
Behold The Deflationary Wave: How China Is Flooding The World With Its Unwanted Commodities
Between commodity-backed financing deals and the centrally-planned mal-investment boom-driven excess capacity, China has a lot of ‘liquidation’ to do to normalize from a credit-fueled smoke-and-mirrors world to a painful reality. As Bloomberg notes, there’s no let-up in the onslaught of commodities from China. While the country’s total exports are slowing in dollar terms (as we noted last night), shipments […]
What Assets Should You Have In Your Moderate Portfolio?
Ibbotson Associates provides asset allocation guidelines that span the risk spectrum from conservative to aggressive. The moderate portfolio consists of roughly 42% in U.S. Stock, 18% in Non-U.S. Stock, 35% Fixed Income and 5% in Cash. It follows that the static Ibbotson model might employ the following ETFs to achieve its moderate growth and income […]
Guess What Happened The Last Time Junk Bonds Started Crashing Like This? Hint: Think 2008
The extreme carnage that we are witnessing in the junk bond market right now is one of the clearest signals yet that a major U.S. stock market crash is imminent. For those that are not familiar with “junk bonds”, please don’t get put off by the name. They aren’t really “junk”. They simply have a […]
Can Google’s Recently Launched YouTube Red Take On Netflix?
YouTube Red is a disruptive product created to take on Netfix and Spotify. Rising Netflix and Spotify subscribers shows that there is certainly a market for YouTube Red. Google/Alphabet has everything in place to ensure that YouTube Red is a roaring success. Alphabet Launches YouTube Red Alphabet Inc-C (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently released YouTube Red in the United States, and […]
Gold Daily And Silver Weekly Charts – Ol’ Man River
Ol’ Man River, that Ol’ Man River He must know somethin’ but he don’t say nothin’ He just keeps rollin’, he keeps on rollin’ along. Just like gold, which keeps rolling along, from West to East. South African headquartered multinational mining company Anglo-American was taken out and beaten with an ugly stick in London on […]
Overflowing Global Oil Storage Leads To Soaring Supertanker Rates
One month ago when oil was attempting another break out above $50, we wrote that the black gold had officially reached its “tipping point” when as we noted China had finally reached the limits of its onshore oil storage capacity. This followed rather dire warnings by both us earlier in the year… … and Goldman more recently, that […]
Subtle Clues: Not Everyone Thinks The Fed Will Win
The illiquid trading of December is already well in evidence – and we haven’t even reached the bad part yet. One we are past the CPI report and the Fed meeting, there will be a few days where serious traders are squaring up based on what they now believe after those data points. After that, […]
Something Did Blow Up In Junk
Now that Kinder Morgan (KMI) has come out with a massive dividend cut, I think it will get harder to ignore that this isn’t just about crude oil prices and the death of “transitory.” There is a financial element here that is perhaps even more important. Kinder Morgan Inc., the biggest North American oil pipeline operator, […]
Ever Greater Distortions Hint At Rising Crash Probabilities
The Poison of Central Planning As is well known, central banks around the world have deployed a range of “unconventional policies” in recent years, ranging from imposing zero to negative interest rates, to outright money printing (QE). Photo via americanpatriotdaily.com We have seen a number of people argue that “QE” does not really involve “money […]
