The old Wall St. adage runs that ‘stocks are not bought, they are sold’, but the idea here is that they are sold to eager acquirers and that the act of selling does not therefore depress the price too much. The same cannot be said of what we have experienced these past six weeks or […]
Category Archives: Equities
Perhaps the first great lesson of economics, as emphasized by Henry Hazlitt, is that there is no free lunch. The second, courtesy of Frederic Bastiat, is that if it sometimes appears that there is one, it means that we simply have not looked deeply enough into the consequences of our attempt to enjoy it. The […]
That’ll teach’em! Enticed by the seemingly risk-free profits being offered by the Chinese stock market stabilization drive, burned fingers spent the week from the lows creeping back to the flames, adding another $1 billion-a-day to the official margin total as they did.
When we last wrote, some brave analyst at a Chinese brokerage was making headlines by talking of there being at least another CNY2–2.5 trillion in ‘shadow’ margin debt to add to the peak CNY2.3 trillion registered on the exchange ( that latter now already shrunken by over a third). Since then, the ante has been upped […]
In trying to describe the mania which is sweeping China, the mere use of superlatives falls far short of conveying a true picture of what is afoot, meaning we have to just let the numbers speak for themselves.
In our previous ‘Money, Markets & Macro’ monthly publication, we devoted some time to a consideration of the fact that the growth in US payroll costs was beginning to outstrip that of business revenues, a state of affairs which we suggested could not long be endured.
Amid all the debate about the US economy and the somewhat vague prospect of the Fed finally showing some cojones at some point in the future, the principle feature which allows the Doves to block any renormalization of the rate is the supposedly soft state of the labour market, particularly with reference to the sorry-looking participation rate.
The first hard data release of the month for China was hardly guaranteed to reassure. Two-way trade in USD terms dropped 6.3% in the first quarter from its level of a year ago, the second most severe setback since the Crash and only the third such instance in the whole era of ‘Opening Up’.
When even the eminent lawyer, Christine Lagarde, interrrupts her incessant calls for more ‘stimulus’ to confess that yes, peut-être, we ought to be on the look out for a bubble or two, you know things have reached a pretty pass. In truth, the awful effects of monetary overkill on the part of the major central banks seems finally […]
As part of our analytical process, we frequently consult our proprietary estimate of global money supply, something we construct by combining the individual measures for 15 countries (strictly 33, since we include the euro as one of them) which together account for almost three-quarters of global output.