This week is options expiration week: the week in which various call and put positions will expire. Wall Street is notorious for using these weeks to gun the markets this…
The investment world is convinced that China is about to engage in another massive round of stimulus. After all, this is what China did in 2008 when its economy slowed,…
Having gotten through the fiscal cliff debacle by the skin of its teeth (somehow passing a deal that both raises taxes AND the deficit), the US political class is now…
We’ve now have just a little over 30 days until US breaches its debt ceiling. We would have already done so, except Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner borrowed some $200 billion…
As the fiscal cliff euphoria and start of the year buying fade, investors are waking up to the fact that fundamentally nothing was fixed in 2012. Indeed, once could easily…
Having moved to the sidelines due to the uncertainty of the US Presidential election and the Fiscal Cliff negotiations (as well as the holidays), investors are beginning to creep back…
It’s common belief that Bernanke and the Fed are printing $85 billion per month ($40 billion to buy Mortgage Backed Securities and $45 billion to buy Treasuries). After all, these…
While the US continues to digest the details of the US Fiscal Cliff Deal (the only important item is that it does nothing to address our debt or deficit problems),…
A month back I warned that the US political class was adopting the very same tactics employed by EU politicians in combating our growing economic/ financial problems. Those tactics are…
The following is an excerpt from the latest issue of Private Wealth Advisory. In it I outline the relationship between the Fed’s commitment to low interest rates, the scramble for…
On December 12, the US Federal Reserve surprised yet again by announcing QE 4: a program through which it would purchase $45 billion of US Treasuries every month. Between this…
Tonight between 7:30-9:30PM, the House will vote on Boehner’s “Plan B” for the fiscal cliff. At this point the entire exercise is one of looking busy for appearance’s sake: it…
The markets in Europe continue to rally hard despite the fact that Europe’s financial system is totally insolvent. At the center of this mess is Spain, which now barely functions…
Do you find the Fed’s announcement of QE 4 confusing? After all, why would the Fed engage in more QE when it just announced QE 3 three months ago? In…
Now that Obama has been re-elected, the BLS and other Government entities have begun to revise all of the positive data from before the November election downward. New jobless claims…
Today the US Federal Reserve announced that it would be implementing QE 4: a policy of spending $45 billion per month buying Treasuries on the long-end of the yield curve…
Ever since the EU Crisis began in earnest in January 2010, EU leaders have maintained the following strategy: 1) Engage in endless meetings/ discussions, none of which resolve anything. 2) …
Last week I outlined the reason why we are very likely going over the fiscal cliff: there are little if any political incentives for the GOP or Dems to fix…
The market continues to track the same pattern it performed going into the failed debt ceiling talks of July 2011. As you’ll recall, then as is the case now, US…
The primary market forces remain in play. The markets are holding up on hopes of additional stimulus from the Central Banks. Some bulls are even calling for QE 4 at…
