Salient to Investors: Boston Consulting Group said: Asia-Pacific centers such as Singapore and Hong Kong are expected to receive most of the newly created wealth in the region that finds its way offshore. Hong Kong has the greatest concentration of billionaires followed by Switzerland. Asian wealth outside Japan will surpass North America
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Stockman said: The baby boom generation has unfairly benefited from bubble-finance, a 30-year explosion of debt which created temporary but unsustainable economic prosperity, and a financialization of the system through lower and lower interest rates that has massively rewarded speculation but not real investments. $60 trillion
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Charlene Chu at Fitch Ratings says: Total lending from banks et al in China was 198 percent of GDP in 2012 versus 125 percent 4 years earlier, and there is just no way to grow out of a debt problem when credit is already twice as large as
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paul Volcker said: The Fed will fall short by being asked to meet price stability and full employment – a mandate both operationally confusing and ultimately illusory. Asking too much is accommodating misguided fiscal policies, dealing with structural imbalances, to square continuously the hypothetical circles of stability, growth
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Leemore Dafny’s examination of health-insurance markets is said to have helped mold the state and federal exchanges that are central to Obamacare’s 2010 health-care law. Her 2010 paper in the American Economic Review found that a lack of competition in insurance markets drives up premiums, that insurers charge more
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Bloomberg Editors write: 59 percent of Greeks, 56 percent of Spaniards, and 38 percent of Italians and Portuguese ages 16-24 were unemployed in March 2013. It is already clear that Europe’s “New Deal for Europe,” is no “New Deal”. The scale is still too small as millions
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria writes: Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal says Americans are about to repeat the lessons of the 1930s, when isolationism led to Hitler and WWII. Yet America spends more on defense than the next 10 great powers put together. Obama’s worldview is rooted in
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: The data is increasingly convincing that the Keynesians have been right, cutting spending in the kind of recession we have gone through will only hurt growth not help it. But spending on its own is not enough. For sustained growth in the long-term, countries
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps warned against the dangers of EU membership saying we are still learning about the European experiment and to what extent it is going to succeed or fail. Phelps cited huge blanks and huge gaps in the euro area – each country is subject
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Barry Knapp at Barclays predicts the Fed will maintain its current rate of asset purchases into 2014, as the labor market is again the Fed’s focus. Knapp said an improving labor market rather than accelerating inflation made the Fed end its last 3 easings – May 1983, February 1994, Feb-to-August, 2004. In
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