Category Archive

Whenever you witness a sharp selloff, such as we’ve seen on Tuesday, the question pops up as to whether this will be the beginning of a trend reversal or simply a shock reaction to a certain event. Judging by yesterday’s rebound, it appears to be the latter, as the major indexes found some footing and almost wiped out the previous …

A variety of news events combined forces yesterday to pull the major indexes off their lofty levels. In the mortgage fiasco arena, Bank of America was sued by a consortium of investment firms and the New York Fed to force the bank to buy back mortgage backed securities worth some $47 billion. This will be just the beginning in an …

Heavyweights Apple and IBM beat Street estimates yesterday, but it wasn’t good enough to appease the investing community. Subsequently, shares sank in afterhours trading, although the market had risen prior because of high expectations. To see how nutty market reaction can be, you only need to look at how Citigroup was cheered, even though their real earnings were dismal but …

Have bankers’ attitudes changed? MarketWatch seems to think so as featured in “Get ready for daredevil central bankers:” We have come to expect our central bankers and policy experts to be gray, predictable and eager to take away the punch bowl once the party gets going. So when they showed up at the Boston Fed conference on monetary policy in …

Some family obligations in Hamburg, Germany, along with a few unexpected visitors, will be filling up my Sunday; so there will be no post today. The regular update of this blog will resume early on Monday.

MarketWatch featured a story with the intriguing title “Monetizing all the debt, all the time:”The oracles at Goldman Sachs Group say that $750 billion of quantitative easing is priced in to the market, and possibly $1 trillion — a frightful prospect that was hardly diminished by last week’s lost jobs report.On top of that, there’s $300 billion to $400 billion …