While the stance of monetary policy around the world has, on any conceivable measure, been extreme, by which I mean unprecedentedly accommodative, the question of whether such a policy is indeed sensible and rationale has not been asked much of late.
Back in mid-March I made the latest of my somewhat rare specific, near-term market predictions, in this case that a US stock market correction or even a crash was imminent. Now some six weeks and a further 5% rally later, I revisit this view.
During the first week of May every year, the maxim, “Sell in May and Go Away,” gets taken out, dusted off and powered up as a reason to sell stocks.
Overnight markets were higher, led by Japan, which gained 3.5%. The Reserve Bank of Australia joined the worldwide easy money party last night, as it dropped rates by 25 basis points.
Japan's Nikkei 225 has been on a tear of late and is now up 73.8% from its interim low in November of 2011. Its Monday gain of 3.55% puts the index up 36.41% in 2013.
The Senate has passed, sending to The House, a bill that would impose a requirement that online merchants submit to state tax collection in states where they have no physical presence.
As kids, we all had the fun of going to the beach and playing in the sand. Remember taking your plastic buckets and making sand piles? Slowly pouring the sand into an ever bigger pile, until one side of the pile started an avalanche?
It’s easy to understand the attraction of things like adjustable-rate mortgages and teaser-rate credit cards. They give you cheap money up front and a few years of breathing room in which to raise your cash flow to cover the eventual higher payments.
Every once in a while I find it very helpful to just sit back and look at charts that essentially have no titling. At least for myself, it’s often an easy way to “see” trends, or more importantly change in trends, without having my own personal bias of the moment get in the way of trying to interpret what the chart(s) may be telling us.
So the writing is on the wall. Business and the world economy can't get much better. And the question -- what do we do about it?
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