Salient to Investors: Flows into emerging-market ETFs have turned positive for the year, reversing outflows in the first 2 1/2 months of 2014. The most inflows in 2014 have gone to India-focused ETFs. Investors have withdrawn $1.5 billion from China-targeted ETPs over concern over economic imbalances there. The RSI of the BlackRock ETF
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: European countries including the UK, Denmark and Switzerland are enacting policies to stem housing bubbles, yet with German mortgage volumes at the highest in 16 years, Germans are taking out smaller home loans and repaying them faster as prudent borrowers and lenders bet that record-low interest rates
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Paulo Silva at Aguirre Newman said wealthy French are fleeing French taxes to invest in Portugal to take advantage of preferential tax treatment. The French have overtaken the British as the largest group of foreign home buyers. Gustavo Soares at Sotheby’s International Realty said the tax benefits
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Kostin, Kathy Matsui, Peter Oppenheimer et al at Goldman Sachs lowered their rating on stocks to neutral and corporate credit to underweight on belief that global equities and bonds may drop in the next 3 months, and stocks may temporarily fall, as rising inflation boosts government bonds and
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Russ Koesterich at BlackRock said volatility is very low because monetary conditions are easy but when investors see the US and UK central banks tighten then we will get a long-awaited rise to normal levels, but not to those of 2008 with the VIX at 90. Pimco expects a new
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Elizabeth Green at Chalkbeat writes: Americans have come up with better ways to teach math but have failed to implement them: from the 1800s to the failures in the 1960s and 1980s through to today. The reason is the absence of a good system for helping teachers
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jeremy Bowles at Bruegel said 54% of EU jobs are at risk of advances in computerization, ranging from 40% to over 60% in each country and close to the US number in the UK, Germany and France. Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University estimated in September
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Chinese millionaires who invest at least $4.7 million and qualify for Australian residency can get around China’s restrictions on converting currency and sending it abroad. China caps the amount of yuan that individuals can convert into other currencies every year at the equivalent of $50,000 and bars transferring currency
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: ConocoPhillips and Abbott Lab are among the most lucrative retirement benefits, and Facebook, Amazon.com and Whole Foods Market among the least lucrative of 401(k) plans at the 250 biggest companies in the US. Over 40 percent of companies allow workers to take company contributions with them if they
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Ray Stone at Stone & McCarthy Research said the extent of labor-market slack may be less than Yellen purports. Stone’s favorite pay measure is table B-9 at the very end of the jobs report: an index that takes into account average hourly earnings, the length of the
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