Tag Archives: newsletter

Gone are the days when Black Friday dominated the retail calendar. While it used to be a somewhat fun way to kick off the holiday shopping season, it had morphed into something else entirely in later years. Scenes of angry shoppers smashing each other over the few big deals stores would truly offer, internet clips of crying children watching in horror as their parents transformed their local Walmart into Thunderdome. Two shoppers enter, one shopper leaves…with the...

Anyone who thinks this bogus “deal” has resolved any of the issues or uncertainties deserves to be fired immediately. Here’s a late-night TV parody of a trade deal: The agreement won’t be signed by both parties, though each might sign their own version of it, and the terms of the deal will never ever be revealed to the public, which includes everyone doing any business in the nations doing the “deal.” How is this “deal” not a pathetic parody of a real deal? A real...

Japan has not recovered fully from the lost decade of the 1990s. The Asian financial crisis was exacerbated by the dot-com crash and then a few years later the global economic collapse. Tokyo has tried everything to combat anemic growth and deflation, and resolve the zombification of the Japanese economy through an immense buildup of government debt and a dramatic loosening of monetary policy, including subzero interest rates. This has become known as...

Salvation Army volunteer James Bond found a gold coin valued at $1,500 inside his kettle in Noblesville. Source: Salvation Army via USA Today ◆ Gold coins worth thousands generously gifted to the charity again this year ◆ It just means so much … because it means that they went out of their way to do something extra special…” ◆ Salvation Army gold donors keep giving gold coins including Gold Krugerrands anonymously every year ◆ At least three gold coins worth some...

Swiss Franc The Euro has risen by 0.05% to 1.095 EUR/CHF and USD/CHF, December 16(see more posts on EUR/CHF, USD/CHF, ) Source: markets.ft.com - Click to enlarge FX Rates Overview: Despite better than expected Chinese data, and last week’s investor-friendly developments, Asia Pacific equities were mixed. Australia led the advancing bourses with a 1.6% gain, its largest for the year despite the government revising down growth and wages. China, Taiwan, and Indian...

Novartis has aborted its latest patent filing at the European Patent Office. (Keystone / Georgios Kefalas) Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis has backed down in a patent dispute over the leukaemia therapy Kymriah following opposition from NGOs. The Swiss NGO Public Eye is claiming victory in the European Patent Officeexternal link battle, but Novartis says the patent in question was only one of several it has in place on the (CAR)-T cell therapy treatment it had...

After last week’s flurry of events, market activity is set to slow over the next three weeks. But what a flurry of events it was. A new NAFTA apparently has been agreed, and it is set to be approved by the US House of Representatives next week and the Senate early next year. The US and China struck an agreement that will get rid of the immediate tariff threat and unwind half of the punitive tariffs in exchange for a commitment to buy twice the amount of agriculture...

Risk assets such as EM got a big boost last week, as tail risks from a hard Brexit and the US-China trade war have clearly ebbed. Still, the initial lack of details on the Phase One deal as well as uncertainty regarding the next phases have left the markets a bit jittery and nervous. Hopefully, this week may bring some further clarity and the good news is that the December 15 tariffs have been canceled.  AMERICAS Brazil COPOM minutes will be released Tuesday. It cut...

It was all fun and games enriching the super-wealthy but now the karmic cost of the Fed’s manipulation and propaganda is about to come due. A “market” that needs $1 trillion in panic-money-printing by the Fed to stave off a karmic-overdue implosion is not a market: a legitimate market enables price discovery. What is price discovery? The decisions and actions of buyers and sellers set the price of everything: assets, goods, services, risk and the price of borrowing...

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives won an outright majority in yesterday’s general election, pushing the Tories to an 80-strong Commons majority in what the Daily Mail called a “staggering election landslide.” Given that the Conservatives employed an election slogan of “Get Brexit Done,” it appears the election was largely a referendum on Brexit. The Conservative victory suggests Johnson will now move forward much more quickly on putting a UK-EU agreement in place for UK...