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.
Part VI is the last of the series of reports from the 10th annual Strategic Investment Conference, presented by Altegis Investments and John Mauldin. Dr. Lacy Hunt, of Hoisington Investment Management, presents his views of the impact on economies when they become heavily leveraged.
China is awash with liquidity. New domestic bank loans have seen some of the strongest growth in years and broad money supply is increasing at nearly 16% per year. Furthermore, property loans have risen 16.4% from the previous year to 13 trillion yuan ($2 trillion).
In my visit back to Pennsylvania last week the subject of reverse mortgages came up on several occasions as more and more seniors have little recourse other than to tap their home equity in order to pay, primarily, medical bills.
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?
In economics as in policing, the bad guys always get to take the first shot. From the central banker's perspective, the bad guy in the current regime is the real economy.
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.
Since the start of the credit crunch in mid-2007 we have seen a steady move forward by government to place greater control over the financial aspects of people’s lives. One of the biggest milestones from an investor’s point of view has been the establishment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
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.
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