Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: Africa has become the great hope of the business world. The World Bank says Africa could be on the verge of a take-off the like of China’s 30 years ago. Populations are stagnating or declining in Europe, Japan and China, while Africa’s population of 1
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Binky Chadha at Deutsche Bank said the market had been pricing in that the Fed would normalize rates much more slowly than it has done historically, and the shock has spilled over across all of the asset classes. The World Bank said the world economy will expand 2.2 percent
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paul B. Farrell writes: 2014 is a virtually guaranteed disaster just waiting to ignite. Bubbles are everywhere. Kit Juckes at Societe Generale says all three worldwide financial bubbles in the last three decades – The Asian Bubble in the early ‘90s, Dot-com Bubble of the late ‘90s
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The median economist says payrolls grew by 165,000 workers in June after rising by 175,000 in May. Russell Price at Ameriprise Financial said the fact that the economy is growing as well as it seems to be, despite heavy headwinds, is testament to much-improved underlying fundamentals, and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Stephen Bell and Dr. Hui Feng at the University of Queensland write: The current Chinese credit crunch differs markedly from those in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and shows China no longer relies solely on political and administrative controls, and is allowing market forces take a greater role. The
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nisid Hajari writes: No Chinese firms rank among the 10 most valuable companies in the world by market value down from 5, all state-owned, in 2008. All top 10 are American – evidence of the US economy’s resilience and skill at reinvention. However, one good stock rally
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeffrey Lacker at FRB of Richmond said Financial markets will remain volatile as policy makers debate tapering, part of the process of incorporating new information into financial asset prices. Reaction to Bernanke’s comments is evidence that they had built-in expectations of more asset purchases than I think the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Bank of America opened a unit in India to review home-valuation reports, while eliminating jobs of licensed US workers in its LandSafe business. Independent banking consultant Bert Ely said with offshoring, the potential for paperwork problems is always there, but it’s hard to be critical for trying to minimize costs. Goldman Sachs
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Alexander Friedman at UBS says: What Fed has done is not unexpected and the market reacted because it was ahead of itself. All the Fed was saying was that the US is doing OK, that the data is trending as it should, and that it has confidence
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Martin Feldstein at Harvard writes: Historically rapid monetary growth fuels high inflation. Germany’s hyperinflation in the 1920s and Latin America’s in the 1980s. More moderate shifts in US monetary growth rates fuel inflation. In the 1970s, money supply grew at an average annual rate of 9.6% and
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