Salient to Investors: David Stockman writes: Laszlo Birinyi says S&P 3200 will be reached by 2017 because there is no reason it cannot keep rising. Since first meeting Birinyi in 1986, I do not ever recall when he was not bullish on equities. His call is wrong because the central bank fed 30-year bull run
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Laszlo Birinyi said: The market is now so dominated by institutional investors, hedge funds and service industries, that sentiment drives prices more than anything else, so predictions based on valuation data going back a hundred years are bound to fail. Recent developments in Amazon, Google, and Chipotle clearly show
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Rich Weiss at American Century Investments said no one expects real economic growth in the US so Laszlo Birinyi’s prediction of 3200 on the SPX comes 5 years late. Weiss said GDP growth of 3% or less and possible Fed tightening does not support such a rise. Mark
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Fareed Zakaria said: New America reports that, since 9-11, 74 people have been killed in America by terrorists vs. over 150,000 killed in gun homicides. ShootingTracker.com says that in the first 207 days of 2015 America had 207 mass shootings. Gunpolicy.org says America’s gun homicide rate is 50 times
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Stephen Roach at Yale writes: Market manipulation a la China is now standard operating procedure in policy circles around the world – the West just dresses up their manipulation in different clothes. QE is essentially an aggressive effort to manipulate asset prices: whether it has succeeded is debatable
READ MORE... →David Stockman writes: Amazon’s valuation, its one day gain and last week’s Google gain are reminiscent of the days before the tech wreck 15 years ago. The 12 Big Cap Techs of 2000 saw their peak combined valuation of $3.8 trillion plunge to $875 billion a decade later, even as their sales
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The IMF said: European growth will rise to 1.7% in 2016 versus 1.5% in 2015 thanks to falling oil prices, a weaker euro and ECB actions this year. Europe remains vulnerable to shocks that could bring prolonged stagnation, like Greece or a moderate shock to confidence from lower expected
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Stockman writes: The central banks have shot their wad after increasing their aggregate balance sheet from $3 trillion to $22 trillion over the last 15 years, which falsified financial prices. The coming deflation will bring a plunge in corporate profits and collapsing prices of vastly inflated risk asset classes. The
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: China’s day of reckoning is delayed again as it is reverts to credit stimulus after attempts to engineer a stock market boom have failed. Economic growth will accelerate over the next few months, giving global commodity markets a brief reprieve. Robin Brooks at Goldman Sachs estimates that capital
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: David Stockman writes: Total non-farm labor hours are no higher than in Q4, 2007 and only 1% higher than in the spring of 2000, meaning we have added virtually no new employment to the US economy over 2 business cycles. Over the 29 quarters after the 1990 business
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