Salient to Investors: Hispanics are the fastest growing component of America’s workforce, yet over 80 percent of Latinos ages 25 and older don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and the unemployment rate for Hispanics was 10 percent in October versus 7.9 percent nationally. The National Center for Education Statistics says 14 percent of Hispanics ages
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Older people are growing and are more likely to forgo purchases of houses, cars and other big-ticket items that the Fed is trying to encourage with near-zero interest rates. William C. Dudley at FRB of New York said spending by older age people is less likely to be easily stimulated by
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Two states voting to legalize recreational use of marijuana marks the beginning of the end of the war on drugs – which has cost $1 trillion over the past four decades. The OECD says the US has over 3 times as many prisoners per capita as it did in 1980, and 10 times as many as
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Alice Rivlin at Brookings said the lesson of Europe is, don’t wait until you’re in a crisis to act and austerity is not a good prescription for weak economies. Rivlin said the US has the luxury the Europeans don’t, no pressure in the financial markets. Mohamed El-Erian at Pimco said the fiscal cliff would
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jonathan Alter says Obama’s victory instantly destroys three myths of this election: Pocketbook issues are decisive. Voters picked the candidate they thought would be on the side of people like me and who would be better for the middle class. Aerial assaults beat ground troops. TV ads are no
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Ezra Klein writes: Changing Washington in 2013 won’t be because of Obama but because a critical mass of senators decide enough is enough. The presidency isn’t the part of Washington that’s broken, it’s Congress enabled by the filibuster. There were more filibusters between 2009 and 2010 than in the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mark Gertler at NYU said Obama’s activism reflects a much larger federal-government role 80 years after Hoover, as well as the development of macroeconomics, giving officials more tools now to combat a slump. Gertler said Obama’s policies in this crisis are the mirror image of what happened during the Depression. Hugh
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Investors can’t get enough government securities even though rising debt loads are blamed for curbing global growth. For the first time since 2008, all 26 markets tracked by Bloomberg and the EFFAS are poised to generate positive returns on an annual basis. Governments are getting a handle
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Philippe Bacchetta at University of Lausanne and Eric van Wincoop at University of Virginia found that: Global trade and financial linkages weren’t strong enough by themselves to have caused the global recession in 2008 – self-fulfilling panics, not contagion, were to blame. The large losses of leveraged financial
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Gary Shilling at A. Gary Shilling & Co writes: Investors’ zeal for yield has: Depressed yields and spreads of below-investment-grade debt versus Treasuries so much that it now takes real skill to default. The global recession will hype defaults even though many low-rated companies have a cushion of safety from
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