Weds brought a note from Dick Davis Digest which I will share with you because they quoted me:
Global Investing has beaten the market over the last five-, 10- and 15-year periods, according to Hulbert.
“I wanted to warn you all not to take too seriously the latest ominous chart pattern, named after the Blimp Hindenburg. Yes, it blew up and set back the cause of motorless flight for decades. But a Hindenburg is clearly not as disastrous as a Death Cross, the last chartist panic call two months ago, which was followed by a normal flat market since then. Neither chart pattern has a long-term convincing history. They are just used by bears to scare us off the stock market.”
Vivian Lewis, Global Investing, www.global-investing.com, 212-758-9480, 8/20/10
Today’s figures on unexpectedly higher manufacturing growth should further encourage Wall St. It is also celebrating the fact that Awful August is over.
Non-EU member Sweden raised the Krone discount rate to 0.75%.
Poland is also mumbling about possibly raising interest rates. It is benefiting from overspill from the astonishing growth in Germany. We are present there too.
The Thai stock market is now back over its all-time high in 2007. We are in that country two ways, including with hard-to-buy small cap stocks from local expert Paul Renaud of www.thaistocks.com
Tony Blair’s book has come out and both my sister-in-law and I think from the reviews (we haven’t yet read the book which apparently is badly-written) that the former British prime minister has been extremely unfair to his successor, Gordon Brown, accusing him of excessive Keynesianism and being anti-business. And of course for abandoning “New Labour” as defined by Blain.
For whatever it is worth, the situation Brown faced could hardly have allowed him to leave it to the market to find its own equilibrium.
The free-market orthodox (there are plenty in the US and other countries besides England) simply have underestimated the nature of the economic crisis the world faced in 2007-8. I have been reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, about how the Bush team adopted desperate intervention measures to save the US financial system and this makes me a bit short with the 20-20 hindsight over the extent of the systemic risk
The US interventionist team was made up experienced investment bankers from Wall St. of Republican affiliation worried about moral hazard but far more worried that whole capitalist system was at risk.
With incredibly poor timing, Merrill Lynch today put out the following note:
“Growth recession launches QE2. The growth recession is here. After salami-slicing our forecast in recent months, we are ready to make a deeper cut. We now expect a growth recession: we think the economy will manage to post positive headline GDP numbers, but this growth will not be fast enough to keep the unemployment rate from drifting higher. We expect below-trend GDP growth in each of the next four quarters, and with a gradual rise in the unemployment rate above 10%. With the weaker growth, we believe the Fed will launch QE2-a new asset buying program-in Q1 of next year. Our interest rate team expects this to push 10-year yields below 2% in the early part of the year. – Ethan Harris, Michelle Meyer, Neil Dutta.”
Mother Merrill’s team is writing that interest rates are due to fall into 2011, and that US Treasury bonds (which go up when rates fall) are a good buy. This sounds absolutely wrong to me.
In a press release reminiscent of the glory days of DR’s, Citgroup sent an notice that they have been named sponsored depositary for Indian travel agency Cox & King, which is listing its 1:1 Global Depositary Receipts in Luxembourg as COXK.LX. Americans are not allowed to buy GDRs until they are ‘seasoned’, after 90 trading days. This is not a recommendation.
More for paid subscribers follows from Ireland, Spain, Israel, Singapore, Japan, Britain. Plus Poland and Thailand. There will be no blog Friday and Monday because of my flying home and Labor Day respectively.
