…Calmly observing the changing world

As I woke up to the sound of my radio alarm clock – and I’ll be honest, “woke up” is a little generous – something strange filtered into my brain from the generally boring news broadcasts. Something so strange, in fact, that I was sure it was a mistake or that I had misheard it [...]

It’s true that no one may ring a bell to tell us that the stock market slaughter is over, but one brave soul working for Templeton Asset Management named Mark Mobius spoke up on Friday: The next “bull-market” rally has begun and there are bargains in every emerging market following a record slump in stocks… [...]

The FDIC closed three banks on Friday, but other than a blip on the FDIC’s bank failure list, no one seemed to notice or care. Except maybe some people in Georgia, where citizens of the Peach State have now seen a staggering number of bank failures. In contrast to the other bank failures, where the [...]

Today, the Federal Reserve shocked long term interest rates into complying with its policies by announcing that they would start buying long term treasuries. Immediately, the prices of long bonds started soaring, sending the yields crashing down. So why did the Federal Reserve do this? A problem arose in December when the Federal Reserve ran [...]

For a while now, we’ve seen the situation where bad news has seemed to cause the stock market to drop farther and farther. If the prices of stocks do one thing only, they model the future expectations of investors – and the worse the news gets, the farther the markets fall. An odd consequence of [...]

From the news, you might think that all governments around the world are giving out as much money as possible and everyone they offer it to is gleefully taking it. You’d be wrong. This week, even a bank decided to give back the money. Specifically, TCF Financial decided to undo the $361 million agreement that [...]

This is a recent quote from Presdient Obama. Let us play a quick game and guess the next line of the quote. This plan will require significant resources from the federal government… but while the cost of action will be great, I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be greater. For it [...]