We believe that the world’s major banks do not need to be involved in commodities trading, and that their involvement in commodity markets increases risks of bank failure, and increases the chance that they might manipulate commodity prices.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is an annual Mecca for trend-seekers in tech. This year, one of the central themes of the show is one that we have touched on before in this letter — the “internet of things.”
We believe this view is of critical importance for investors. Many investors waited out some or all of 2013 on the sidelines and failed to benefit from the market’s gains. Although we don’t expect a ride without bumps in 2014 — a correction of 10 percent or more wouldn’t surprise us...
China’s leaders laid out a road-map for reform in November, and some of the key proposals were concerned with changes to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). These huge entities have dominated certain sectors of the Chinese economy, and many believe they have crowded out more efficient private-sector companies.
Many public academics and policymakers in the 1970s and 1980s raised fears of overpopulation and its dire effects on developing nations. But we don’t believe that those fears were behind the Chinese policy.
Defense and aerospace contractors are experiencing two significant headwinds. We could describe the first as secular — the long-term draw down of forces as U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reach their questionably successful conclusions.
China’s extraordinary growth since the Deng Xiaoping’s opening has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. At the same time, it has also seen the deepening and extension of corruption that was real in pre-reform China; but before liberalization, corruption had a smaller economic body on which to grow.
The period of China’s most robust growth has corresponded with the global rise of the internet and the digital economy. This convergence is placing China in the forefront of e-commerce growth worldwide.
Unemployment has remained stubbornly high during the recovery that has followed the Great Recession. This high unemployment, as we noted above, is a fundamental concern of the incoming chief of the Federal Reserve, to the point where...
Many investors and global macro economists have been on vigil for a ramp up in global inflation spurred by immense central bank QE and other forms of monetary stimulus.
We believe that there is compelling historical evidence that strong GDP growth leads to strong corporate profits, and strong corporate profits lead to strong stock prices.
As we write this, Capitol Hill’s partisan bickering and rancor have reached the conclusion we anticipated. We don’t believe that the conflict which monopolized headlines for the past two weeks is of lasting import.
We predicted Venezuela’s collapse when Hugo Chávez came to power, and we’ve reiterated this opinion every few years since. The movement towards economic collapse is accelerating. In addition to enriching himself from the public purse...
Germans went to the polls on September 22 to elect parliamentary representatives. They handed a resounding victory to “Mutti Merkel” as the chancellor Angela Merkel is affectionately known -- Germany’s “mom.”
Peer-to-peer lending has hit the big time. It started just before the financial crisis as a fresh idea among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to connect lenders directly with borrowers — to have “the little guys helping the little guys” as one borrower has described it.
China’s phenomenal growth hasn’t come without environmental costs; and those costs have reached the point where public disapproval is significant enough to give the central government severe headaches.
After the Second World War, the U.S. was — to put it politely — in a very fortunate situation. Our major industrial and manufacturing competitors were in ruins, and needed to rebuild.
“Use tape.” That was the advice of a graduate student to Russian-born scientist Andre Geim in his University of Manchester lab in 2003, when he was trying to figure out how to create an ultra-thin layer of graphite.
Since we read Steve Brill’s exposé of medical pricing in the March 4 issue of Time magazine, we’ve noted a steady stream of news coverage about the ways in which a lack of price transparency cripples the U.S. healthcare market.
