Salient to Investors: Jay Wong at Payden & Rygel said continued earnings beats is helping drive the market, which has a lot of momentum. The Index of consumer confidence was the weakest since November 2011 and lower than the most pessimistic forecast in a Bloomberg survey. 75 percent of the 179 S&P
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: These are boom times for farming and a bust for farm jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers will see the steepest decline of any employment category by 2020. David Anderson at Texas A&M said one-quarter of farms have sales under $100,000 annually
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Ezra Klein writes: The most important piece of economic policy in 2013 is immigration reform. A tenth of the US population is foreign-born. Over 25% of US technology and engineering businesses started from 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born owner, while half of all tech startups in Silicon Alley had
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values increased 5.5 percent from November 2011, the biggest year-over-year gain since August 2006. The NAR said the 1.82 million existing homes on the market last month were the fewest since January 2001. Mortgage rates near a record low are propelling demand that’s outpacing supply. Freddie
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Sean Callow at Westpac Banking expects clear reiteration from the Fed that quantitative easing will continue for some time. Callow said the strong dollar story is tough to make right now, and the growth differential will be supportive for the euro against the dollar in the next few
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A. Gary Shilling at A. Gary Shilling & Co writes: In periods of prolonged economic pain, international cooperation gives way to an every-nation-for-itself attitude, including competitive devaluations. Decreasing the value of a currency, by creating and selling unlimited quantities, is much easier than supporting it, by selling
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Gaelle Blanchard at Societe Generale said there’s a run of risk aversion on concerns for growth. Martial Godet at BNP Paribas CIB said global earnings growth should be stronger than 2012 for emerging-market companies, particularly China, while commodity and oil prices are resilient, which helps Russia. The MSCI emerging-markets
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The median economist estimated unemployment in the euro region rose for a fifth month to 11.9 percent, the highest jobless rate since records began in 1995, while German unemployment held steady at 6.9 percent. The median economist expects the euro-area economy to decline 0.4 percent in Q4 2012, annual inflation
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Gina Martin Adams at Wells Fargo Securities says: Investors should go against the herd as the market is overbought and sentiment is at levels seen at peaks and tops, fundamentals are weak with economic data in January missing expectations, and there is consistent deceleration in earnings growth. Improving housing
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Handing monetary policy to independent central bankers appears to have worked. The Cleveland Fed says markets expect US inflation over the next 10 years to stay below 1.5 percent, while the IMF expects below 2 percent in advanced economies and 6 percent in emerging markets for the
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