Insights

Sandy Weill, the guy that tried to build Citigroup into a financial supermarket and who is very well known on Wall St. called for the big banks to be split into deposit and lending banks on one hand and investment banks on the other. This was done before as part of...

Spain reported today that rather than its economy growing at 0.2% for the 2Q/12 it actually shrank 0.4% for the quarter. Also, 7 more of the 17 regional governments are expected to do as Valencia has done and ask for government aid to meet regional deficits. Spain was...

You may remember that I said that in 2011 the US Federal Reserve bought 61% of all newly issued US Treaury debt. Part of that was to increase demand in order to push bond prices higher and thus interest rates lower. But, the other part of that is to offset sharply...

Long-time readers know I am an avid reader of Barron's Magazine. Though the tone, especially that of editor Alan Abelson is, let's say skeptical, there is a lot of good information there. Alan has often praised Stephanie Pomboy for her economic insights and she is...

If you are one of those people that believe that the main reason the market went up one day or another is because of the reason TV newscaster cite, I think you'll have a hard time understanding the markets. Technical factors play a much bigger role than people think....

Oil and natgas were up over 2% each today. Stocks were up 0.25% as was gold. Bonds were pretty flat. I'll have some more ind-depth thoughts tomorrow that I will post here.

US stocks were up nicely today afte being down earlier this morning. Currently, the S&P 50 is up 0.75% today. Ben Bernanke had testimony before Congress where he delivered a rather downbeat statement on the economy. But, some are relieved that he didn't address any...

I have posted the July newsletter. It is a special issue on debt. As always, I have a section on the investment implications. Click on the Newsletters tab at the top of the page and select the most recent one.

Markets around the world are up today, most better than 1%. I can't find much of a reason for it other than short-term traders may have figured the recent leg down was the bottom of a see-saw pattern that you can clearly see in my short-term term chart I posted in...

How have stocks done over the last year? Here's a picture of the S&P 500 stock index. Click to enlarge the picture. Two things are quickly apparent: 1) Stocks have not made much progress in the last year. The 1 year return is 3.6% of which 1.6% is from price...