The steep rise in income inequality is a consequence of a spectacular reallocation of income from labor to capital. It repressed wages and created the biggest profit bubble ever. But pressures are rising. The bubble will get pricked. There will be cons…
Tech isn’t exactly booming, as we’ve seen from numerous revenue and earnings debacles, collapsing sales in China and Russia, massive layoffs…. But that hasn’t kept “valuations” of money-losing, revenue-challenged tech st…
“Thank goodness equities went up in 2013, otherwise it might have been a rather depressing year” – Societe Generale’s exasperated Global Quantitative Research team.
I thought we’d never see “Merger Monday” again, the concept. But now, the unthinkable happened, the zombie phrase has walked back into the scene. Like in the bubble days of 2007: the big numbers were there, the deal exuberance, the craziness, the hoopla.
Germany has its own JP Morgan, the bank that could do no wrong and got bailed out by the Fed and the taxpayer while CEO Jamie Dimon walked on water with a nimbus floating above his head, at least in the eyes of regulators and the government. Until someone had the gumption to peel away layers of obfuscation. What emanated was the acrid stench of internal putrefaction from the top down. After a series of legal battles, fines and settlements are piling up in the magnitude of tens of billions of dollars.
Bernanke wanted to reflect on the “accomplishments of the past eight years,” demolish the “sceptics” that still doubted the Fed was the best thing since sliced bread, and pat himself on the back. His policies “have helped promot…
Plug Power soared 50% on Thursday. With Friday’s gain, it has surged 68.4% in the first two trading days of the year. Not because it got a buyout offer from some company interested in alternative power generation for data centers or something, but because it made another one of its promising announcements.
Nothing could have been a more pungent metaphor for the current investment climate than the headline, “Macau gambling revenue hits record $45 bn in 2013.”
There have been three mega-crashes in my investing lifetime, and three concurrent peaks in margin debt. In April, margin debt broke the record set in 2007 and has continued to rise. Over the last three months, it has soared 10.9%. Are we there yet?
Financial engineering had a glorious year. Now finally, after five years, the crazy fun is back, and the good thing is: this time, it’s different. This time, the smart money is selling!
