Salient to Investors: David Kostin at Goldman Sachs said the S&P 500 will climb to 1,750 at year-end, to 1,825 in the next 12 months and 1900 at year-end 2014, as economic growth gains momentum, and recommends companies that generate most of their revenue domestically. Kostin said the real issue is that rising interest
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: S&P’s Capital IQ Leveraged Commentary and Data said the market for covenant-light loans has already soared to $155 billion this year, beating the record $96.6 billion in 2007. The lowest rated junk bonds were the greatest percentage of speculative-grade offerings last month since 2011. Bank of America said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Jim Rogers says prices for food, education, insurance, just about everything that we buy are going higher and the government tells us there’s no inflation. Some independent measures say it’s over 6 percent already, and it will go much higher because they keep printing money. Read the full
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: William Pesek writes: History will judge Abe by what he did, or did not do, to end the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. It’s mind-boggling how disengaged Japan’s leaders have been since the near-meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, just 135 miles from Tokyo. Nuclear regulators remain more
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Nick Kounis at ABN Amro Bank said the external environment is really getting better, led by signs that US demand is picking up, and Q2 should mark the end of the recession in the euro area, though the recovery will be excruciatingly slow. Evelyn Herrmann at BNP Paribas said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: The Euro Stoxx 50 Index is at 12.5 times projected earnings, versus 15.3 times projected earnings for the S&P 500 and 14.2 times income for the Topix. Bulls say European stocks are cheap as the first expansion for euro-area manufacturing in 2 years helps drive forecasts for profit growth of more
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Joseph Lupton at JPMorgan Chase is not expecting a boom in Europe, but sees a momentum shift in markets and the world economy, citing a change in perception from no way out of the crisis to seeing growth. Lupton says the euro area is 1/5 of global GDP. Lupton said
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard said: Janet Yellen and Lawrence Summers qualify to replace Bernanke because of their dovishness about placing too much weight on stable inflation when unemployment is far above its longer-run level. Aggressive monetary stimulus is needed, even at the cost of moderate price increases, because with weak
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Hedge funds cut net-long gold positions by the most since June. while holdings of short contracts rose 26 percent. Net-bullish bets across 18 US-traded raw materials dropped to the lowest since March and a measure of bets on agricultural commodities turned negative for the first time. Holdings in global ETPs backed
READ MORE... →Salient to Investors: Author Chrystia Freeland said Putin is playing the classic authoritarian leader’s playbook and is chiefly concerned with what is good for Putin, not Russia. Julia Ioffe at The New Republic said on the one hand Russia wants to be part of the West and seen as an
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