Salient to Investors: Retailers from Macy’s to Wal-Mart Stores missed Q2 sales estimates and cut forecasts. Jennifer Davis at Lazard Capital Markets sees a shift away from spending on apparel and discretionary items to spending on homes and automobiles as consumers feel better, are willing to spend on larger item purchases
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Larry Levitt at the Kaiser Family Foundation said for the most part insurers are finding the market for Obamacare attractive and are pricing accordingly. Levitt said it is surprising how inexpensive some of the Bronze plans will be: they carry high deductibles and significant out-of-pocket costs, but for
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The OECD said: Germany will expand 0.7 percent in 2013 versus 0.4 percent predicted in May France will grow 0.3 percent in 2013 versus shrinking previously predicted of 0.3 percent The UK will grow 1.5 percent in 2013 versus 0.8 percent predicted in May. In the euro area, re-balancing
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: For most Americans, the real estate crash is over and personal wealth is back where it was in the boom. For blacks, 18 years of economic progress has vanished, with a rebound in housing slipping further out of reach and the unemployment rate almost twice that of whites. Black homeownership fell
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joseph E. Gagnon at the Peterson Institute for Intl Economics writes: QE still is the right policy. QE bond purchases are not comparable to stimulus spending on roads and tax cuts, which adds to the national debt. QE is a swap of one asset, bank reserves, for
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria writes: The World Bank says that in 1981, nearly half of all world citizens were impoverished versus less than a fifth today. However 95 percent of the total global decline has to do with China, whose poor declined by nearly 680 million people in the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Caroline Baum writes: C. Fred Bergsten says Sweden combines a social welfare society with a free-market economy and a high degree of government efficiency: nearly two-thirds of Swedes confirm by phone that the tax form prepared for them by authorities is correct. cards use your Michael McDonald
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Matthew C. Klein writes: GDP has been expanding at the same rate in half1 as it has since mid-2010, showing that Fed stimulus has offset fiscal tightening. However, growth is still too anemic to return to anything resembling full employment for several more years, even under the most optimistic assumptions.
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Mohamed El-Erian at Pimco said: Weakening emerging-market growth and spiraling currencies risk creating headwinds for a recovering US economy. Longer-term, we should care due to the feedback loop to the US. We will see a tightening of financial conditions to markets, with growth more challenged and the ability of
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Private-equity firms, hedge funds and REITs have bought more than 100,000 US homes, becoming dominant single-family landlords in markets hardest-hit by the housing crash such as Atlanta. Christopher Thornberg at Beacon Economics said investors that are building home-rental companies may not want to take on the red tape, stigma of
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