The Federal Debt: The current amount The U.S. Government owes is over $19 trillion and therefore it is mathematically impossible to pay back. They will never be able to pay this back. Central bankers are in uncharted waters. They do not know how to create economic growth and fight deflation in some areas of…
Nearly a decade since the housing bubble burst the dirty skeletons still emerge from the closet, and still nobody goes to jail. In the latest example of how criminal Wall Street behavior leads to zero prison time and just more slaps on the wrist, overnight Warren Buffett’s favorite bank, Wells Fargo (WFC), admitted to “deceiving” the…
Universal Forest Products (UFPI – Analyst Report) has been banging up against all-time highs over the last month and is the Bull of the Day after it recently became a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).The company designs manufactures, treats and distributes lumber products for the do-it-yourself, manufactured housing, wholesale lumber and industrial markets.Its products include pressure-treated wood, engineered…
Francois Perol, CEO of BPCE, France’s second-biggest bank, is more worried now than he was in 2009. “It was 100 percent clear what had to be done in 2009,” said Perol, who cited negative interest rates, China, regulations, and a global slowdown as current worries. BPCE is the result of a 2009 merger of cooperative banks Banque Populaire…
Oil prices steadied near a high of $38.30 thanks to demand optimism following firm economic indicators from the United States and Germany. This bullish sentiment held through to the Asian afternoon, although these encouraging signs could hardly counter a persistent over-supply of 1 million barrels per day. A decline in U.S. crude stockpiles reported earlier this week was mainly attributable to weaker imports…
Deals and Financings WuXi AppTec, China’s largest CRO/CMO, and Juno Therapeutics (JUNO) of Seattle have formed a 50-50 joint venture to bring Juno’s promising immuno-oncology drugs to China (see story). The new company, JW Biotechnology, will be based in Shanghai and will eventually own China rights to Juno’s products, once certain unspecified conditions are met. Juno…
What Changed This Week?
Although there is no convincing technical evidence that dollar’s retreat in Q1 is over, we suspect it is nearly complete. We will be especially sensitive to reversal patterns, divergences with technical indicators, and other signs that the move is exhausted. The fundamental economic driver of our medium term constructive outlook for the US dollar, the…
Crud oil prices shot 22.6% higher in the four weeks ending March 18. That was its best four-week stretch of performance since June 2009. Naturally, it was impossible for investors to ignore that phoenix-like rise from the ashes, as it was widely cheered in the mainstream financial media. But after watching oil drop 15% in…
The epic battle between the bears and bulls rages on with this completely annoying seesaw action all dominated by the short-term interventions in the Japanese yen versus the U.S. dollar/Chinese yuan. I frame it as such because the yuan is pegged to the dollar and relations between the Chinese and the Japanese are about as…
