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Posts Tagged ‘Economy’

Are Your U.S. Treasury Bonds Safe?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , on December 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from Wall Street Journal.

“President Barack Obama has recently unveiled bold new plans for government programs and tax breaks to try to boost the economy. These initiatives have no price tag yet, but they will require significant spending.

You can debate whether new highway and bridge projects and sundry tax breaks will help the economy. That’s a political question. But as the U.S. government piles borrowing atop more borrowing, it begs a financial question that is not utterly ridiculous: Are your U.S. Treasury bonds safe?

On its face, the probability of the U.S. defaulting on its spiraling debts seems highly unlikely. But that’s not what the markets think. The price of insurance against such a default—using derivatives known as credit default swaps—has jumped by more than 50% in the private market in recent months. According to CMA DataVision in London, a specialist in these contracts, it will now cost you 0.34% of the principal per year to buy default insurance on U.S. government bonds. If you held $1 million in Treasurys, insuring against default would cost you $3,400 for the year. A few months back, insuring those bonds would’ve cost less than $2,000.”

Read the full article here.

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The worst is yet to come: Unemployed Americans should hunker down for more job losses

Posted in boic, Economy, tagged , , , on November 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is realitycheck article from NY Dailynews.

“Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

There’s really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.”

Read the full article here.

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Unemployment Skyrockets: “U.S. now beating European unemployment rates”

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , on November 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is some news from OpenMarket.org.

“Unemployment is now higher in the U.S. than in Europe,  reports the Washington Post.  “The official U.S. unemployment rate, reported last Friday, now stands at 10.2 percent,” compared to “9.7 percent” in Europe.   This is the highest rate inmore than 26 years, and marks a huge change from the recent past, in which unemployment was double the American rate in much of Europe.

Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, whichrefused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus package, and only 7.6 percent in Germany, which adopted a stimulus package that was smaller relative to its economy than ours was.  (Countries that refusedto adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated President Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)

A “broader measure of U.S. unemployment,” including discouraged workers, puts U.S. unemployment at 17.5 percent, reports the New York Times.

As the Post notes, “For many on the left, the lament for years has been: Why can’t America be more like Europe? Why can’t rustic Americans be more like sophisticated Europeans? The sentiment has resurfaced in recent months as the health-care debate has raged on — why can’t the American health-care system be more like Europe’s?”

Well, America is now more like Europe when it comes to unemployment.  But not when it comes to social benefits and protections.  The American Left knows how to import Europe’s failures, but not its successes.

The massive health-care bill passed by the House on Saturday is a classic example.  It would expand health care coverage somewhat, but not to European levels, and it would vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels.   It would also increase taxes to “European levels of taxation.”  The health care bill contains politically-correct provisions that Europeans would never put up with, like pork for trial lawyers and racial preferences.  And restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.”

Read the full article here.

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Keep Your Hands Inside the Coaster, We Are At The Top Of The Second Hill

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Economy, tagged , , , on November 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an interresting observation from Pravda.

“It is becoming more and more evident, to the astute observer of realistic economics, that the second dip in the “W” global recession is coming up quickly. This is of course, identical to what took place between the 1929 collapse and the 1931 final landing. The world economy fell hard, bounced high and than fell into a deep black hole, that it took it thirty years to climb out of. This time will be worse, at least for the Anglos and more specifically the Americans.

The signs are everywhere: massive government stimulus (read money printing) whose only obvious effects have been on the stock markets around the world (again, just like in 1930), continued increases in global unemployment and thus a collapse in global goods demand, instability and a free fall in the shipping indexes. That is correct, it is not just the Baltic Dry Index, which is once again in a free fall, now that the Chinese have stopped hording iron ore, but also the various other indexes, including Chinese ones.

That is a sign of real doom, not only for China, but for many others. The fact that containers of goods are not moving out of China, in September and October, regardless that the Chinese stimulus has kept its factories producing as if nothing is wrong, means that the holiday shopping season will be empty and hallow, just like the Anglo mantra of recovery. Sure, France and Germany are out of recession and Russia and Italy are both heading out too, but that is because they have done the exact opposite of the Anglos, by cutting taxes, controlling spending, putting down real hard infrastructural investments and projects without tying them in courts and hearings for years, cutting regulations while avoiding nationalizations, in other words the smart moves vs the Anglos dumb ones. The Anglos, specifically America and England and to a lesser degree, Canada, have done the opposite on all accounts, regardless of warnings. No amount of Hopy-Changy media Zombies will change the inevitable out come.”

Read the full article here.

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Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , on November 2, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a market commentary from Financial Times.

“Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets – equities, oil, energy and commodity prices – a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply , while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable.

This recovery in risky assets is in part driven by better economic fundamentals. We avoided a near depression and financial sector meltdown with a massive monetary, fiscal stimulus and bank bail-outs. Whether the recovery is V-shaped, as consensus believes, or U-shaped and anaemic as I have argued, asset prices should be moving gradually higher.

But while the US and global economy have begun a modest recovery, asset prices have gone through the roof since March in a major and synchronised rally. While asset prices were falling sharply in 2008, when the dollar was rallying, they have recovered sharply since March while the dollar is tanking. Risky asset prices have risen too much, too soon and too fast compared with macroeconomic fundamentals.

So what is behind this massive rally? Certainly it has been helped by a wave of liquidity from near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing. But a more important factor fuelling this asset bubble is the weakness of the US dollar, driven by the mother of all carry trades. The US dollar has become the major funding currency of carry trades as the Fed has kept interest rates on hold and is expected to do so for a long time. Investors who are shorting the US dollar to buy on a highly leveraged basis higher-yielding assets and other global assets are not just borrowing at zero interest rates in dollar terms; they are borrowing at very negative interest rates – as low as negative 10 or 20 per cent annualised – as the fall in the US dollar leads to massive capital gains on short dollar positions.”

Read the full story here.

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