Salient to Investors: Douglas Brinkley at Rice University said Obama avoided disaster. David Redlawsk at Rutgers said voters are still going to vote their pocketbooks. Harvard professor Robert Blendon said voters admire people who get things done, but the ruling won’t shift a lot of health policy voters. Read the full article at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-28/obama-s-supreme-court-win-may-help-now-more-than-november.html
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Kenneth Heebner said the U.S. is poised to outperform most countries – lower growth in Asia and Europe will lower oil and commodity prices, a de facto tax cut for U.S. consumers. Heebner sees forces driving the U.S. in a positive direction – the real estate bust has created pent-up demand for housing
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Heat wave that set or tied 196 daily temperature records yesterday moves east, promising to raise energy demand. MDA EarthSat Weather expects July to be one of the five warmest since 1950 in the large cities that use the most energy. Read the full article at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-28/u-s-weather-promises-energy-boost-as-temperatures-rise.html
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Kurt Brunner at Swarthmore Group said Europe is not going away for the next three years. U.S. executives are tapping into their record pile of cash for the first time in four years as they drive spending on plants and equipment to an all-time high. David Sowerby at Loomis Sayles
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: A record 7.3 million workers 65 or older are competing for jobs. Joblessness among 16 to 24-year-olds was 16.1 percent in May, versus 8.2 percent rate for the nation. Payrolls in May grew at the slowest pace in a year and joblessness has topped 8 percent for 40 consecutive
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Wall Street has decided overwhelmingly to back Romney versus four years when it was among Obama’s biggest backers. Anthony Scaramucci at SkyBridge Capitalsaid we should be a country based on class movement, not class warfare. Stan Collender at Qorvis Communications said a President Romney would have the same kind of problems that Obama has had, and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Peter Orszag at Citigroup said well under 0.1 percent of cars and trucks in the U.S. run on natural gas versus seventy-five percent in Armenia. More natural-gas cars and trucks could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollutants. There are fewer than 2,000 natural-gas filling stations in the
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joseph LaVorgna at Deutsche Bank Securities says the economy is muddling through, while concerns about the collapse of manufacturing are grossly overblown, and we’re in a housing recovery. Britons repaid more mortgage debt than they borrowed in May for the first time in at least 15 years. Manufacturing
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Total loans at the four largest U.S. banks fell 4.9 percent in Q1 versus an increased of 9.8 percent for the 17 smallest of the 24 firms in the KBW Bank Index. David Trone at JMP Securities said the big banks’ shrinking loans has earnings implications, because the removed loans,
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Boston College Center for Retirement Research said pensions in Illinois, New Jersey, Indiana and Kentucky may have less than 30 percent of assets needed for promised benefits Pension fund shortfalls are estimated to be $900 billion to more than $4 trillion, depending on assumptions made. Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Institute said
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