Salient to Investors: The Asian Development Bank said: China’s surging wage costs are undermining competitiveness and threatening growth. Average inflation-adjusted wages have more than tripled in a decade and non-wage costs have risen since a 2008 labor law – restrictions on workers’ mobility through the household registration system known as hukou. Changes in
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Mary Schapiro, the former chairman of the SEC is joining a firm loaded with former government financial-services regulators. Schapiro previously ran FINRA, Wall Street’s self-appointed watchdog. Alan Blinder at Princeton is a co-founder of Promontory Interfinancial Network which offers Insured Cash Sweep, which splits large deposits into
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mark Luschini at Janney Montgomery Scott said the payrolls report is a huge disappointment and will spook the market. Eric Zoldan at JHS Capital Advisors said we are in a very difficult economic environment and expects a lot of pressure on the market. Zoldan said most importantly the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Bill Gross at Pimco said: The most renowned investors from Buffett to Fuss to Soros may owe their reputations to the most attractive era for money management as expanding credit fueled gains in asset prices across markets. Maybe the era made the man, not the man who made the era – the real test of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Jeffrey D. Sachs say smart machines are substituting for young unskilled labor, and our children and grandchildren will be worse off as the wages of unskilled young adults decline. While a subset of young adults is tech savvy and the leading edge of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Stockman said: The Fed has flooded equity markets with cash while weakening the Main Street economy and the phony money has created an unsustainable bubble economy that will begin to falter within a few years. When it bursts, there will be no 2008-style bailouts and America will begin an era
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David A. Stockman writes: The US is broke – fiscally, morally, intellectually – and the Fed has incited a global currency war that will soon overwhelm it. This latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by phony money from the Fed rather than real economic gains, will burst within a
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Helene Rey at London Business School says the US enjoys an exorbitant privilege from the returns on its assets held in the rest of the world. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas at Berkeley said before 2007, the predicted crisis was that the US would not be able to borrow anymore and the dollar would collapse. Gourinchas
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Marc Faber of the Gloom, Boom and Doom Report said: Printing money creates bubbles because it doesn’t flow evenly into the economic system but stays in the financial services industry and among people who have access to these funds like the wealthy. The printing press helped inflate
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A. Gary Shilling at A. Gary Shilling & Co. says 5 of the 7 varieties of deflation are present in the US economy. Commodity price deflation will continue as oversupply continues to swamp demand amid weak global growth and a hard landing in China, which remains export-driven. The slow global
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