Salient to Investors: Mary Brinton at Harvard said Japan suffers from a play-it-safe mentality which focuses more on potential downsides rather than on opportunities. Brinton and Toshio Yamagishi at Tamagawa University say the breakdown of the lifetime employment system may be the main anxiety that leads people to play it safe – there’s still a prejudice against hiring
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum says: the effect of raising tax rates on labor supply is small since most don’t have the option to work less. the cut in marginal rates is minimal compared with earlier cuts from 70 percent to 50 percent to 28 percent in 2001 and 2003, which were followed by a decade of mediocre
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mayra Rodriguez Valladares at MRV Associates said being big and global isn’t what it used to be, and sees global banks jettisoning divisions abroad and at home. UBS, Citigroup and RBS are reversing decades of global expansion. Charles Dallara at the Institute of International Finance said globalization of financial markets said reversing decades of going
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Professor Koichi Hamada said the BOJ’s efforts to end decades of deflation are very weak, as is its policy of buying short-term government bonds. Instead it could buy foreign bonds and debt with longer maturities, and increase purchases of REITs and ETFs. Any inflationary concerns could be eased by raising interest rates. Hamada said the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff said: the economy is stuck in the mud and it will be a wageless recovery – the fiscal cliff would trigger a recession. Housing is bottoming out. and banking is on the mend and banks are more willing to lend money. likes gold-mining stocks and utilities, dividend-paying healthcare, utility and consumer-staples stocks. likes
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mao Sheng at Huaxi Securities said investors see a clearer direction and roadmap for government reforms. The OECD said as many as 300 million people will move from the countryside to the cities by 2030. The proportion of China’s population in cities rose to 51 percent by the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A Bloomberg Government study says $4 trillion of spending cuts and tax increases over 10 years envisioned by Democrats and Republicans would be inadequate as a long-term fix – $6 trillion in deficit reduction will be needed in the next decade as a minimum down payment for a sounder fiscal footing.
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Robert Gates said: While ground forces will undoubtedly get smaller, we must not get fixed on the idea that high technology is the only answer to military challenges. “No matter how a war starts it always ends in mud” – General Stillwell WWII Pentagon bureaucracy is structured to plan for
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: John Paulson at Paulson & Co. said he has reduced bets that the EU sovereign-debt crisis would worsen following ECB comments in July that it was committed to preserving the euro. Paulson said the recovery in housing is a bright spot in the U.S. economy. Read the full article at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-04/paulson-said-to-blame-bet-against-europe-for-most-of-loss.html
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joshua Shapiro at Maria Fiorini Ramirez the US economy will grow 1.5 percent in 2013. monetary policy is having a limited near-term impact on growth the $1 trillion U.S. fiscal deficit is an important drag on future expansion. adjustments that affect the economy are all very long-term and are
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