Wall Street evidently neglected to read beyond the headlines Friday stating, as The New York Times put it, “Jobless Rate Holds Steady, Raising Hopes of Recovery”. One need look no further than paragraph two to find the other side of the story that the rest of us already know: “The monthly snapshot of the job market released by the Labor Department on Friday was hardly cause for celebration....”
Friday, January 22, 2010
A major story in late 2009 was the negative correlation between equities and the U.S. dollar. In the chart below, I show the correlation of the logarithmic daily price changes of the S&P 500 and the U.S. Dollar Index futures composite. It appears the attention has been well deserved: both the 3-month and 1-year rolling correlations are the lowest they’ve been in at least two decades. No sooner than some investors began noticing the negative correlation, others started calling a bottom…
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Marco Arment comments smartly on this NYT story describing the arrangement among stores like H&M and Wal-Mart and their suppliers, whereby the suppliers give stores credit for unsold products and instruct stores to destroy the items instead of sending them back: It’s unfair to criticize these two companies for a practice that’s incredibly common in the entire industry, spanning nearly every product category and nearly every major retailer. The wastefulness of this is disgusting, but I’m not sure who’s really at fault, if anyone.…
Monday, September 7, 2009
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In American political discourse, it is permitted to speak about race, sex, gender, and religion. Class, however, is the one category about which we are not permitted to speak, or, increasingly, to think. Witness the speed with which any policy proposal with potentially egalitarian consequences is labeled “class warfare” in the press; if this epithet is becoming less common, that’s likely only because the category itself is less and less familiar in the public mind. And why admit the existence…
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The financial sector of the U.S. economy has had nearly a year to address the problems that exacerbated the crisis last fall. But many observers think that the banks haven’t done enough, and that another round of trouble may be developing for the sector. I will outline some of those concerns and then suggest some ways to use options to profit if there is indeed another shoe to drop in banking. The Thesis The primary obstacle facing large banks is that they…
Saturday, March 6, 2010
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