Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: Both the American left and right are concerned about the declining mobility of the American dream. Countries that invest more heavily in children’s health care, nutrition, and education, well-being more generally end up with a much stronger ladder of opportunity and access than America.
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: US companies have issued $241 billion in junk bonds this year, more than twice the amount during the same period in 2007. US stocks are near record highs. Investors’ use of borrowed money to buy stocks is up one-third in the past year to a near record. Housing prices are surging in
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William D. Cohan writes: Janet Yellen favors staying the course on QE. Larry Summers apparently prefers to begin winding down QE. The Yellen-Summers debate is the latest example of a decades-long tug-of-war between those inside The Club (Summers) and those excluded from it (Yellen). Almost all of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum writes: Private foreign investors sold a net $67 billion of Treasuries in June, a record and the second consecutive monthly outflow, and sold agency securities, corporate bonds and equities. The US Treasury is looking at much higher borrowing costs as 41 percent of the debt has
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paul Dwyer writes: Small business is NOT the engine of US job creation. Census Bureau data show that small businesses destroy almost as many jobs as they create. There is more geographic and economic diversity among high-tech formations than for the private sector as a whole, where
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Richard Fisher at FRB of Dallas said: The US economy is improving, employment is picking up and the housing market has turned. US companies are lean and mean and ready to go with stronger balance sheets. We have artificially suppressed rates, and this cannot go on forever. 65 percent
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Brian Edmonds at Cantor Fitzgerald said there is not a whole lot of willing buyers in Treasury land. Hedge-fund managers et al increased net-short position in 10-yr note futures last week to the most since July 2012. Jason Rogan said the numbers are on the weak side, but not enough to change
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William Pesek writes: A week after Japan’s debt reached the 1 quadrillion yen ($10.28 trillion) mark, yields have actually declined. BOJ Governor Kuroda is winning bondland’s full obedience with two forms of trickery: essentially transferring money via monetary policy from citizens to the government, and outright monetization of public debt. The
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum writes: Paul Krugman at Princeton says Milton Friedman has virtually vanished from the policy discourse and a few decades from now, historians will regard him as little more than an economic footnote. I believe Krugman, not Friedman, will end up as the footnote. Krugman’s claim
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Peter Orszag at Citigroup writes: Over the past 3 years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Peter Newland at Barclays says one reason is the mismatch between the work that companies need
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