Salient to Investors: China understands that its economy needs to slow down. Too much money is flowing into unproductive investments with local officials often to blame. Its effort to engineer a soft landing is laudable and long overdue, but unless it pushes ahead with political as well as market reforms, surrenders
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Big banks claim a safer financial system would be bad for the economy because tougher banking rules will squeeze their lending and hold back investment. Markets disagree. On July 9, the day regulators published their proposal, the S&P 500 Index rose 11 points and the 10-yr US T-note held steady. On
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Pankaj Mishra writes: The proliferation of street protests around the world seems to have nothing in common. But why all now? The most common claim is that they are fueled by the rising expectations of a middle class demanding clean, transparent governance, but what kind of democracy
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Alexander Friedman at UBS and Kiran Ganesh at UBS Wealth Mgmt write: The dollar’s role as the de facto global currency for more than 6 decades has made Fed monetary policy one of the US’s greatest exports. Up to 60 percent of global transactions are conducted in US dollars, over
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Sy Harding at Asset Mgmt Research Corporation writes: The four-year presidential cycle is a potential bad omen for the stock market in 2013 or 2014 or both – there is usually a market correction in the first 2 years of each presidential term, followed by recovery and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Matthew C. Klein writes: Glass-Steagall 2 would do nothing to protect us from the devastation we recently experienced. The belief that the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act made the financial system safe and promoted decades of prosperity and that the 2007 crisis would never have happened if G-S had
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jim Rogers writes: Things can stay below the cost of production for years. It takes a long time for people to believe they have to close their mines, which costs money. So any commodity can stay below the cost of production for a while. Read the full
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jim O’Neill writes: Too much of the world’s trade and finance is conducted in dollars. The exorbitant privilege has lasted too long. It is time one or two of the emerging-market governments did something about the US’s ability to borrow in its own currency – an advantage the rest
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Clive Crook writes: The global economic recovery is hardly worthy of the name. The IMF has again reduced its forecasts for the world economy. Recessions involving financial crashes are harder to recover from. Two great failures of coordination receive scant economic discussion. Precious little effective international cooperation
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Americans lost more years of life to heart disease, lung cancer, pre-term birth complications, diabetes and at least 21 other conditions in 2010 than most other members of the 34-country OECD. The US failed to keep up with other nations in improving population health over the period 1990 to 2010 despite spending
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