Salient to Investors: Stretched budgets and sluggish growth are putting emerging-market governments on a collision course with rising pressures from recently empowered middle classes for more spending and better services. Policy makers face the end to an era of abundant global liquidity that helped fuel the fastest expansion in three decades. The
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A. Gary Shilling writes: The Fed has yet to achieve its dual mandate of price stability and full employment. QE had been tried by the Bank of Japan for years without notable success, but Western central banks have become increasingly desperate as they look for ways to
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: Unlike most developing nations, China spends little on subsidizing current consumption but spends massively on export-free zones, highways, rail systems and airports. No developing democracy has been able to ignore short-term political pressures and execute a disciplined growth strategy with such success. China’s growth
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Senators Elizabeth Warren and John McCain are wrong in believing that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by commercial banks taking undue risks with depositors’ money, though it is true that they courted too much risk, Causes of the financial crisis were many and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Christine Lagarde at the IMF said a US court ruling against Argentina over its defaulted debt could have detrimental consequences for global financial stability, by bolstering the power of minority bondholders in future debt restructurings and hurt the IMF’s mandate to maintain financial stability in the world.
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Matthew C. Klein writes: Bernanke suggested that the CPI probably overstates inflation. He is right if all we talking about is things we buy in stores and services. The problem is that most people also have to spend money on assets that they hope will provide for
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum writes: For the past two months, the Fed has been doing everything in its power to depress long-term interest rates. The Fed seems to talk as if they can send rates tumbling again. They can’t. The problem is the underlying message, not communication. The US economy is gradually
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The FRB of San Francisco says: Normal wage models do not apply during and after recessions. In the last 3 US recessions, wages held steady or did not decline by very much, despite spikes in unemployment, during the downturns, and then as the economy recovered and unemployment fell,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Clive Crook writes: The US and advanced economies have not done enough to head off the next financial meltdown. Gain made in safety is likely to be too small even to offset the danger created since the crash by greater concentration in the finance industry. The emerging
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Walter “Bucky” Hellwig at BB&T Wealth Mgmt said Intuit’s monthly small-business employment index, which measures hiring at companies with fewer than 20 workers, and Insperity’s average number of work-site employees paid per month at customers both provide an earlier and accurate read on employment trends at small- and
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