Salient to Investors: William Pesek writes: Alibaba’s shares slide with each new report of middle-class Chinese raising cash and delaying spending. Alibaba’s $166 billion market cap exceeds the annual output of many countries. The Chinese economy will weaken further: domestic and external demand is sliding along with the stock market. China will experience a negative
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Stockman writes: The S&P 500 has sliced through both the 50-day and 200-day moving averages. 2130 on the S&P 500 will prove to be a generational high. CAT, China, European luxury brands, the NASDAQ Biotech Index are shorts. Expect the Fed to announce they are well short of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: Radical Islam is the default ideology of anger, discontent and violent opposition for a small number of alienated young Muslim men around the world. Only Muslims and particularly Arabs can cure this cancer. In the 12 years between 9/12/01 and 2013, only 42 Americans
READ MORE... →Fareed Zakaria said: It is the big, contentious democracies, Britain and the US, that have prevailed in the world, not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union. No organization has ever benefited from being able to be the sole judge of its own performance. Ruchir Sharma at Morgan Stanley said:
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Chinese millionaires who invest at least $4.7 million and qualify for Australian residency can get around China’s restrictions on converting currency and sending it abroad. China caps the amount of yuan that individuals can convert into other currencies every year at the equivalent of $50,000 and bars transferring currency
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Credit Suisse said: Chinese buyers are pouring into the Australian residential market every year, pricing out a generation of Australians from the housing market, with many facing a lifetime of renting. Over the past 5 years, Sydney prices have risen by 45% and Melbourne by more
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Australia’s Q4 GDP exceeded the median economist estimate. Paul Bloxham at HSBC said the rebalancing act is under way, and a great comfort for the RBA – rate cuts are off the table and interest rates may have to rise before year-end. Katrina Ell at Moody’s Analytics said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Ramin Toloui at Pimco said: Asian growth is stabilizing but not stellar but may receive a boost in 2014 as developed markets accelerate. Asia’s trajectory will continue to be shaped critically by the growth path in the U.S. and Europe China’s growth in the next decade requires
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Housing in Australia accounts for 60 percent of average household wealth versus a global average of 45 percent. Average household debt has been near 150 percent of annual income since 2006 versus 135 percent in the US. House prices have not fallen more than 10 percent in
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Grantham at GMO said: Commodity prices fell for a hundred years by an average of 70 percent, and then from 2002 basically everything tripled and regained the whole decline in 6 years – tobacco was the only commodity that fell. The game changed because of the
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