Investment Watch Blog

by Michael Snyder It has been quite a year.  In March, catastrophic flooding in the Midwest absolutely crippled thousands of farms and “as many as a million calves” were lost in Nebraska alone.  Then in April we learned that African Swine Fever has wiped out “150-200 million pigs” in China.  To put that in perspective, that is more pigs … Read more

Chart: https://imgur.com/iEhmmxd Source with a lot of interesting charts: Uber Is Going Public: How Today’s Tech I.P.O.s Differ From the Dot-Com Boom Not since the dot-com boom have so many richly valued tech companies gone public in such short succession: Lyft and Pinterest are now trading shares, and soon Slack, WeWork and Palantir are expected to follow. … Read more

Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter Now even the surface of the market has softened, not just the underlying dynamics. Back in August 2018, I stuck my neck out and said that the housing market in Sonoma County in the San Francisco Bay Area had experienced a turning point in July, based on data and boots-on-the-ground observations by … Read more

via Zerohedge: Ask any banker (or analyst) what the difference is between a junk bond and a loan, and you’ll most likely get a blank start in response: starting with the size of the loan market, which is now virtually identical to that of the high yield bond market, continuing through the standardization of loan … Read more

via Zerohedge: Following last month’s disastrous starts and permits data, Tuesday’s release of the S&P/Case–Shiller US National Home Price Index hinted at a nasty slowdown in all 20 metropolitan regions the index tracks, indicating that the era of double-digit growth is coming to an end. Case-Shiller’s 20-City Composite expanded at just 3.00% YoY in January (just … Read more

by Charles Hugh-Smith Our expectations have continued ever higher even as the pie is shrinking.. Let’s see if we can tie together four social dynamics: the elite college admissions scandal, the decline in social mobility, the rising sense of entitlement and the unrealistically ‘great expectations’ of many Americans. As many have noted, the nation’s financial and … Read more

Rachel Maddow: “Just think of John Bolton as a human being.” AC

by Lynette Zang of ITM Trading Ignorance of financial plumbing does not make you immune, it just leaves your fiat wealth vulnerable to confiscation. If you can see the risk and what the smartest guys on money are doing for themselves, you can emulate them and most likely be in the best position when the next financial crisis … Read more

by Frank Holmes, CEO, U.S. Global Investors The U.S. economy is growing at one of the fastest rates in the developed world right now, and unemployment hit a nearly 50-year low of 3.6 percent in April. Under normal circumstances, this should boost demand for domestic equities. Some investors, however, are hesitant to participate due to … Read more

Holy Hypocrisy! The Political Class are the 1% (Link to article below) https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/05/01/chrystia-freeland-taxes-rich_a_23720034/?ncid=other_twitter_cooo9wqtham&utm_campaign=share_twitter        

China has the world’s fastest and largest high-speed rail network — more than 19,000 miles, the vast majority of which was built in the past decade. Japan’s bullet trains can reach nearly 200 miles per hour and date to the 1960s. They have moved more than 9 billion people without a single passenger causality. casualty … Read more

by Troy The stock market has now fallen -3.9%, which is almost to the normal -5% level of what most traders define as a “correction”. Meanwhile, the charts look like they’re making a potential “bull trap”. Combined with the fact that the S&P today is still where it was in January 2018, many traders are … Read more