Money and Investing
Monday, January 25, 2021
Why mainstream media's slander of wall street bets pisses me off regarding GME.
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Saturday, August 8, 2020
Tuesday, August 4, 2020
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Housing prices in Utah
Thursday, January 9, 2020
Almost ALL the Gold Sold on eBay is FAKE!
Friday, January 3, 2020
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
Friday, August 16, 2019
New Asian flu?
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Friday, August 3, 2018
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Re: Book - "he Ponzi Factor" by Tan Liu
My brother lent me a hard copy of the book "the Ponzi Factor" by Tan Liu that states the stock market is a Ponzi Scheme, the data in this book is compelling and disturbing. It is a quick read, interested in your view point.
Kevin
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Thursday, August 31, 2017
What Colleges and Graduate Schools Don't Want You to Know
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Fwd: China
Beijing's devaluation of the yuan allowed it to fall by its biggest one-day margin in a decade. The central bank said the 1.9% decline was due to changes aimed at making the way it sets exchange rates more market-oriented. The U.S. dollar also gained against the yen, Indian rupee, South Korean and other Asian currencies.'
http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/08/11/stocks-tuesday-23/
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Monday, June 1, 2015
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Fwd: Balance Sheet
Optimists take the view that, like a skilled pilot, Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen will be able to bring the size of the balance sheet down smoothly and steadily without hitting too much turbulence.
Pessimists, however, believe the pilot is flying blindly through dense clouds with a faulty radar and constant risk of storms, making the policy normalisation process particularly risky.
"For me the new thing to look out for is what they do to the portfolio," says Robert Michele, chief investment officer at JPMorgan Asset Management. "We know about moving the [interest rate] corridor. What we should be worried about is what they do with the balance sheet."
The Fed's strategy for reducing its bloated balance sheet has evolved over time, but in September policy makers said the Fed will cease or start phasing out reinvestments only after it first begins increasing short-term interest rates. The balance sheet would shrink in a "gradual and predictable manner", but the details were left unclear — as well as the timing, which will depend on how economic and financial conditions evolve.
One market concern is that allowing assets to roll off automatically as they mature could lead to a jagged path of balance-sheet reduction. BlackRock's Investment Institute pointed out in a recent report that a third of the Fed's entire Treasury portfolio, about $785bn, comes due by the end of 2018. Allowing the balance sheet to deflate that quickly could spook markets.'
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/520377e8-037e-11e5-b55e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3bGOeKjV8
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Fwd: Inflation
Economic Headwind
Not only is the dollar's rise reducing price pressures, making it harder for the Fed to tighten, it's also acting as an "economic headwind reducing the need to tighten," said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP LLC in Jersey City, New Jersey.
The FOMC made a nod to the dollar's impact on the economy in its policy statement, noting that export growth has weakened. Yellen was more explicit in her press conference, saying that exports would be a "notable drag" on growth this year and tying that to the strength of the dollar, which she said partly reflected the strength of the U.S. economy.
Yellen said the currency's rise was also "holding down import prices and, at least on a transitory basis at this point, pushing inflation down."
"The Fed sees the stronger dollar as effectively tightening conditions in the U.S.," said Jonathan Wright, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a former economist at the Fed's Division of Monetary Affairs. "They are worried about what will happen to the dollar and financial markets when the Fed starts tightening with much of the rest of the world at negative interest rates." '
Friday, March 20, 2015
Fwd: Inflection
A "Brave New World" of Tough Oil
No one better captured that moment than David O'Reilly, the chairman and CEO of Chevron. "Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history," he told a gathering of oil executives that February. "The most visible element of this new equation," he explained in what some observers dubbed his "Brave New World" address, "is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply." Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: "The era of easy access to energy is over."
To prosper in such an environment, O'Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy. It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls "unconventional oil" and what I labeled at the time "tough oil": resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale. "Increasingly," O'Reilly insisted, "future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure."
For top industry officials like O'Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter. It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits. True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world's problem, not theirs. "Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge," O'Reilly declared. "The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production."
On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What's Left. Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia. Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.
Over the Cliff
By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, "easy oil" deposits. In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East. Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP's latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had "peaked" was "the theory of peak oil."'
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2015/03/20/why_the_oil_price_is_really_collapsing_111061-2.html