Salient to Investors: Rich Weiss at American Century Investments said no one expects real economic growth in the US so Laszlo Birinyi’s prediction of 3200 on the SPX comes 5 years late. Weiss said GDP growth of 3% or less and possible Fed tightening does not support such a rise. Mark
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Stephen Roach at Yale writes: Market manipulation a la China is now standard operating procedure in policy circles around the world – the West just dresses up their manipulation in different clothes. QE is essentially an aggressive effort to manipulate asset prices: whether it has succeeded is debatable
READ MORE... →David Stockman writes: Amazon’s valuation, its one day gain and last week’s Google gain are reminiscent of the days before the tech wreck 15 years ago. The 12 Big Cap Techs of 2000 saw their peak combined valuation of $3.8 trillion plunge to $875 billion a decade later, even as their sales
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: China’s day of reckoning is delayed again as it is reverts to credit stimulus after attempts to engineer a stock market boom have failed. Economic growth will accelerate over the next few months, giving global commodity markets a brief reprieve. Robin Brooks at Goldman Sachs estimates that capital
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Linda Yueh at Oxford University said: The Chinese stock market is not very important to ordinary Chinese because at most only 50 million households invest in it, and they average less than 10 to 15% of their assets. Retail investors follow the herd so volatility is endemic in
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Michael Snyder writes: Global debt is at record highs, too big to fail banks have never been more reckless, and global financial markets have never been more primed for a collapse. Most people lack the patience to wait for long-term trends to play out so if the stock market is
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Stockman writes: Google’s unwarranted market cap gain last Friday – 75% of the 9.6% gain in net income from the prior quarter was due to a lower tax rate and a cutback of ballooning G&A expenses – easily passed in one day the entire $50 billion market cap of Caterpillar, though only
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Charles Hugh Smith writes: Building new gleaming headquarters generally marks the top of a bank’s fortunes. So Facebook’s glamorous new headquarters, Apple’s under construction “spaceship” campus, Google’s plans for an ultra-modernist headquarters may indicate excessive confidence in endless growth of revenues, profits and valuations. Projections based on permanently parabolic growth
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mark Hulbert writes: Investor popularity of greed over fear indicates we are close to a stock market top. At the recent San Francisco Money Show, hundreds of seminars catered to greed, while only a handful catered to managing risk and loss. At market tops greed completely replaces fear as investors’
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Share buybacks are now the preferred way to boost stock prices in the face of softening earnings. Quarterly spending on dividends has risen 80% and capital-expenditure budgets have risen 44% since early 2009, whereas spending on buybacks has risen nearly 5 times . In Q1 2015, SPX companies returned
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