The three best stocks of the past decade
Baltimore: If today’s action from the markets is any indication of what investors think about Uncle Sam and his Washington minions, the upcoming mid-term election is going to get interesting.
Nothing talks in Washington any louder than money. Today, the big spenders are betting against the land of the free and the home of the brave. But of course, if you’ve been paying attention, the action is no surprise.
If you invested in United States treasuries over the last year, you bought into the worst performing sovereign debt across the globe. Thanks to the Obama administration’s unending yearning to artificially pull the nation’s GDP into positive territory, investors are quickly raising their nose to the country’s ever-growing pile of debt.
In all of…
Stimulus 2.0: Give a Penny, Take a Penny
Get ready for Stimulus Version 2.0. With unemployment in double-digit territory, credit still tight and consumers refusing to part with their cash, it’s obvious Washington’s first bailout did nothing but put the nation even further in debt and give China an even larger stake of the country’s financial future.
Stimulus 2.0: Give a penny, take a penny
By Andrew Snyder, TodaysFinancialNews.com
Baltimore – (TFN): Get ready for Stimulus Version 2.0. With unemployment in double-digit territory, credit still tight and consumers refusing to part with their cash, it’s obvious Washington’s first bailout did nothing but put the nation even further in debt and give China an even larger stake of the country’s financial future.
Instead of stepping back and searching for a viable solution (if there is any), Obama is jumping right back into the stimulus game.
But of course, the word stimulus is nowhere to be found. This is a jobs program.
Sure, it contains another $50 billion for roads, bridges and water projects… just like the first version.
Sure, green energy and “weatherization” is a strategic focus… just like the first…
Goldman Sachs – Defending the biggest kid on the block
Resident voice of reason at The Daily Reckoning, Bill Bonner takes a hard look at Goldman Sachs and replaces jealousy with admiration.
“We pick up sword and shield, ready to fight for Goldman, after reading the Financial Times. The FT has devoted a whole page to Goldman bashing. It’s time someone stood up to say a kind word for the firm.”
Should we Fire the Fed?
All eyes and ears are on the Fed this week. With Bernanke in New York discussing potential new bubbles and the New York Fed getting heat for overpaying AIG’s many creditors, investors are having a tough time knowing exactly who to follow.
For those of you who hold up the “Fire the Fed” signs, move over. I am thinking about joining your camp.
Should “Big Tobacco” run the government?
Baltimore — (TFN): If politicians would get their heads out of their re-election campaigns, they would not have to make hasty, thoughtless decisions that cost you and I money.
In the days following Obama’s inauguration, Washington quickly passed a wide set of tax reforms. Part of the legislation included a $400 tax break for the country’s working class and increased healthcare funding for the country’s poor, unhealthy children thanks to increased taxes on the tobacco industry.
It is no surprise neither measure has worked out as planned.
According to reports today, more than 15 million of us will have to pay back the $400 we saved in taxes over the last few months due to an error on Washington’s end.
I hope Uncle Sam…
Break up the banks
Finally, someone with real power in the current financial world has stated the obvious: The world’s big banks need to be broken up into utilities that do what you and I think of as banking, and speculative trading companies that take risky bets on the …
Don’t blame Coke
Attention, America. Coke wants you to know that it did not make you fat. Why don’t you go exercise more?That’s the gist of an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week by Muhtar Kent, the chief executive of Coca-Cola (KO). What’s got Kent all …
Kimberly Clark Corp. Offers a Strong Defensive Position and a Generous Dividend Yield
In the last few months we have seen a very strong stock market rally. The market has recovered from highly distressed levels and posted exorbitant gains. In addition the “wall of money” from the U.S. Federal Reserve has pushed risk-prone investors back into the market, pushing its general level up.
You see, the massive fiscal stimuli and ultra-easy money from the Fed does indeed have real effects on the economy. Whether you want to call them artificial or real, the stimuli have moved and will continue to move profits, until it is withdrawn. And the timing of the deployment of the fiscal and monetary stimuli, the timing of its positive effects and the timing of its eventual removal are uncertain.
In…
Pay attention to stimulating conversation
President Obama’s tough-love speech to Wall Street on Monday underlined the increasing importance of government’s role in the markets over the coming years. Whether you call it state capitalism, socialism or some other epithet, investors ha…
No Fear
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Lehman bankruptcy. The media struggles to say something meaningful about it. Here at the Daily Reckoning we will not even attempt meaningfulness. We’ll be satisfied with a few snide remarks.
What is most remarkable about the world a year after Lehman fell is that so little seems to have changed. Even the papers have noticed.
“A year after Lehman, little change on Wall Street,” says the headline on today’s International Herald Tribune. “Backed by huge U.S. government guarantees, the biggest banks have re-structured only around the edges. Employment [on Wall Street] has fallen just 8% since last September.”
“Obama to push banking overhaul,” says another headline at the Telegraph. Yes, the pols will try to convince…
Did the stimulus save a million jobs?
Say what you will about the Obama Administration’s decision to spend $787 billion to revive the economy. According to its Council of Economic Advisors, which is headed by Berkeley economist and Great Depression expert Christina Romer, it has sav…
Clairvoyant Economists Still Pessimistic
The Economist magazine, in a column wryly titled “Pangloss Revisited”, notes that “The average deficit over the next decade in now expect to be 5.1% of GDP, compared with an average of 4% in the original budget”, and that even in the last year of the forecast, 2019, the budget deficit is supposed to be 5% of GDP! Wow!
As weird as that is, it gets weirder later in the article when Peter Orzag of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), whom the article called “Mr. Obama’s top budget man”, has “tried to put a positive spin on the situation. By 2019, he argued on his blog, America’s primary deficit (the difference between revenue and spending excluding interest…