Investment/Trends

Taper Is Coming. Stock Market Rises.

"Yesterday, the stock market rallied a little. The explanation, according to a Reuters story, is that there are signs that the Federal Reserve will begin tapering in September. As you will recall, for six consecutive days, the stock market tanked. The explanation for the tanking was this: the expectation was that the Federal Reserve will begin tapering in September. This expectation was based on a careful reading of the minutes, which said the FED will not change its present policy." Continue reading →

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Needy EU Nations Woo Chinese Home Buyers to Ease Slump

"Cyprus, Greece and Portugal are providing resident permits to foreign buyers, while Spain is about to adopt a similar measure. The chance to purchase a home at depressed prices in southern Europe and gain what’s known as a golden visa is mostly being sold to Chinese investors, according to brokers. Southern Europe is the latest target for rich Chinese homebuyers, who have been snapping up properties from Vancouver to London since 2010 as their wealth swells and China’s government steps up a three-year campaign to cool home prices there. The number of millionaires in China rose 4 percent from the previous 12 months to 2.8 million." Continue reading →

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Debt of One Quadrillion Yen? Not a Problem

"Haruhiko Kuroda doesn’t wear a wizard’s hat when he arrives at Bank of Japan headquarters each morning. Kuroda has done something truly supernatural in his five months as governor of the central bank. The more yen he conjures up to produce inflation, the more he mesmerizes markets. Yet a week after Japan’s IOUs reached the 1 quadrillion yen ($10.28 trillion) mark, yields have actually declined. What is Kuroda’s secret? The first is what economists call 'financial repression' -- essentially transferring money via monetary policy from citizens to the government. The second is outright monetization of public debt." Continue reading →

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Fund manager Ned Goodman ditches bank stocks for gold

"Ned Goodman, founder and chief executive officer of holding company Dundee Corp., shed the last of his bank shares after forecasting global inflation will make investments such as gold stocks and organic beef more rewarding. Goodman, who oversees about C$10 billion ($9.6 billion) for Dundee and its investments in real estate, precious metals, energy and infrastructure, sold the last of the company’s Bank of Nova Scotia shares earlier this quarter. With the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks printing money, it’s only a matter of time before currencies lose value and inflation rises, Goodman said." Continue reading →

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Treasury chief says U.S. again perilously close to breaching the debt ceiling

"Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew urged Congress on Thursday to raise the US borrowing ceiling, warning that not doing so could jeopardize Washington’s creditworthiness and raise fears of a default. With the US closing on the point where spending will surpass available funds, Lew said it was crucial for Congress to raise the debt cap as soon as it comes back into session at the beginning of September. Failure to raise the ceiling would force cuts to many parts of the government, including the military and social security benefit payouts, and 'have disastrous effects for our nation,' Lew told an audience in Mountain View, California." Continue reading →

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Are commodity prices about to explode?

"Prices in financial markets are determined by psychology, by what people think stocks, bonds and commodities are worth rather than what they actually are worth. Recent sentiment readings for some key commodities, such as copper, gold, sugar, wheat, cattle, etc., were at extreme levels of negativity. From a contrarian aspect of course, that's very bullish. We see a similar pattern in many, but not all commodities in respect to commitment of traders, where knowledgeable commercials are comfortably long. On the other hand, speculators, who as a group usually guess incorrectly at turning points, are taking the other side of the trade with bearish bets." Continue reading →

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Bond Funds Lose $30.3 Billion in August in Big ‘Shift’

"The withdrawals for the month through Aug. 19 are already the third-highest on record, following $69.1 billion of withdrawals in June and $42 billion in October 2008, according to a report dated yesterday by TrimTabs Investment Research in Sausalito, California. Bond funds have suffered $4 billion in redemptions this year, on pace for the biggest withdrawals since investors pulled $7 billion in 2004. The prospect of losses in the fixed-income market and rising rates have spurred investors to retreat after pouring $1.2 trillion into bond mutual funds and ETFs from 2009 through 2012." Continue reading →

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The Problem With Altcoins

"Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency." Continue reading →

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A Solar System Is Installed in the US Every 4 Minutes

"If market growth continues at its current pace, the American solar industry could be installing a system every minute and twenty seconds by 2016. That's a dramatic difference from 2006, when installers were only putting up one system every 80 minutes. Solar is on an extraordinarily fast growth trajectory. Two-thirds of all distributed solar in the U.S. has been installed over the last 2 1/2 years. And by 2016, cumulative installations of distributed PV will double. That means the U.S. will hit 1 million cumulative residential solar installations by then -- making the market in 2016 ten times larger than it was in 2010." Continue reading →

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The Single Best Investment Opportunity Today

"At least 71 new nuclear plants are under construction somewhere in the world today, and another 484 are in some stage of planning. That exceeds the number of nuclear facilities under construction or consideration before Fukushima ever happened. It is an unparalleled level of nuclear-plant construction. The existing 437 nuclear reactors that exist consume on an annual basis about 175 million pounds of uranium. Yet, the world’s existing uranium mines only produce about 145 million pounds a year. The world has papered over that 30-million-pound gap with a U.S./Russia agreement to turn weapons-grade uranium into industrial uranium." Continue reading →

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