Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders this week assailed rival Hillary Clinton for taking large speaking fees from the financial industry since leaving the State Department. According to public disclosures, by giving just 12 speeches to Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations, Clinton made $2,935,000 from 2013 to 2015: Clinton’s most lucrative…
Predictions about financial markets are, almost without exception, notoriously wrong and worthless. With that caveat: we have our first respectable major DOOM prediction of 2016! Are there good reasons to be panicky about global financial markets right now? Absolutely! Oil prices are cratering to unbelievable lows, China’s growth that’s been propelling the whole world is…
Global markets are facing a crisis and investors need to be very cautious, billionaire George Soros told an economic forum in Sri Lanka on Thursday. China is struggling to find a new growth model and its currency devaluation is transferring problems to the rest of the world, Soros said in Colombo. A return to positive…
Barclays Plc plans to shut most of its cash-equities business in the Asia-Pacific region as Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley pushes to reduce costs, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The near-exit from cash equities is part of plans to eliminate about 50 percent of jobs at the wider equities unit in the…
The idea behind asset allocation is simple: when one market struggles, it’s OK because an investor can jump into another that is thriving. Not so in 2015. In fact, if you judge the past year by which U.S. investment class generated the largest return, a case can be made it was the worst for asset-allocating…
David Rosen / Flickr, CCThis isn’t me, obviously. It just feels like me.I had an annoying surprise this weekend: an email from a bank telling me that Twitter had deleted two of my tweets for copyright violations. The email also contained a threat: If I continued to violate the bank’s rights, my Twitter account would be…
*** CONTENT STARTS HERE *** START Shkreli, CEO Reviled for Drug Price Gouging, Arrested on Securities Fraud Charges 32-year-old suspected of plundering Retrophin to pay debts By Christie Smythe and Keri Geiger | December 17, 2015 Photographs by Peter Bohler Video by David Nicholson From END BODY COPY CENTERED START Photographer: Francesco Nazardo END A…
The people having the most success destroying the Wall Street elite these days are not bomb-throwing anarchists. They are buttoned-up investment types who are just less greedy. Traditionally, the Wall Street investment industry has grown rich by skimming off a portion of the astronomical amount of money that passes through its hands. In exchange for…
New Line Cinema/youTubeOrcs.Albert Edwards has central banks in his sights again. Societe Generale’s bearish strategist wrote a note to clients Thursday going back to what he calls, “my favorite pastime — kicking the Fed.” This time Edwards said that the Fed and other central banks have waited too long to raise interest rates, allowing companies to…
Goldman Sachs seems worried about bond-market liquidity. In a note to clients Tuesday, Charles Himmelberg and Chris Henson at Goldman Sachs dissect the recent decline in dealer inventories of investment-grade corporate bonds. This sounds arcane and boring, but their analysis is one of the most important and troubling things we’ve read about bond-market liquidity. Now,…