Salient to Investors: Jeremy Grantham at Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo says: The US is muddling through reasonably well in the short-term, but long-term we are in a slowdown unappreciated by most economists – because they are not interested in the long-term. US growth won’t ever return to previous levels because
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Brian Jones at Societe Generale said many things are going the right way – more people working means more people spending, which to some extent neutralizes higher taxes. Dean Maki at Barclays expects GDP will rise at a 2 percent annual average pace in half2 from a 1.5 percent rate in half1
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Ex-trader Chris Arnade writes: The asymmetry in pay is the engine behind many of Wall Street’s mistakes and rewards short-term gains with disregard to long-term consequences. The result is over-reliance on excessive leverage, banks loaded up with opaque financial products, and flawed trading models. Wall Street’s pay
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Zhu Min at the IMF said the financial market structure did not change very much and we are not safer. Sanford Weill, John Reed, David Komansky and Philip Purcell have said that financial conglomerates could be more valuable and safer if split apart. Amar Bhide at Tufts University says no one can
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Alice Schroeder writes: By many accounts, Warren Buffett has pulled off another brilliant feat in spotting an opportunity in food stocks, yet he never made a significant investment when Heinz lagged the S&P 500 from December 2008 to January 2013, and since January 1997. Heinz’s stock was fairly priced before the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The financial foundation of leading-edge boomers is stronger in the aggregate than commonly assumed, and is likely to improve in coming years. A study by Alan Gustman at Dartmouth, Thomas Steinmeier at Texas Tech and Nahid Tabatabai at Dartmouth found that the inflation–adjusted wealth of people aged
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Daragh Maher at HSBC said Moody’s downgrade was not unexpected, and the drop in the pound in 2013 is small when framed in the context of a longer time-frame, so further falls would not represent an overshoot. Maher said the comfort expressed by the gilt market is largely built
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Moody’s said the U.K.’s high and rising debt burden means deterioration in the government’s balance sheet is unlikely to be reversed before 2016, and while the U.K. has considerable structural economic strengths, expected slow growth of the global economy and the reduced speed of debt reduction in the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Keith Chen at Yale says: The grammar of the language we speak affects both our finances and our health. If you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A paper written by Frederic Mishkin at Columbia University, David Greenlaw at Morgan Stanley, James D. Hamilton at the University of California in San Diego, and Peter Hooper at Deutsche Bank Securities said: The Fed’s hold on policy may weaken should possible losses on its balance sheet coincide with high US budget
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