My column this week is a brief foray into the world of the market wave and cycle theorists (mainly Elliott Wave guy Bob Prechter). I'll put up some relevant links later, but right now I've got to run.
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Sorry for the lack of posting. To make amends, here's a little motivational video for all of you:
So I'm riding into Louisville from the airport this morning (I was in town to give a speech to the local CFAs), and I asked my host about the local economy. He reeled off a few employers and then said, "health care, health care's really big here."
Funny thing: I was in Winston-Salem a couple of months ago and heard the same thing. My memory's not so clear on Richmond and Buffalo, which I've also visited recently, but I think health care came up as a major local industry in those cities too. I used to live in Birmingham, Ala., which was formerly all about steel but now prides itself as a medical metropolis. And then there's Pittsburgh, and ...
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Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is sorry. Speaking yesterday at a conference sponsored by Directorship magazine (which has named him CEO of the Year), Blankfein expressed remorse for the firm's role in helping to bring the country to the brink of financial collapse:
"We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret and we apologize for them."
A few hours later, in a move Goldman swore wasn't related to recent efforts to burnish its public image, the firm said it would spend $500 million to foster small-business growth—a helping hand to a Main Street still deeply struggling with the effects of financial crisis and recession (even as Goldman itself is back to record profits).
So, what do you say? Could it be time to forgive the vampire squid?
I've written a piece for TIME.com that's headlined U.S.-China Trade: Prepare for Continued Imbalance. Which pretty much explains what it's about.
In today's WSJ, Nick Wingfield addresses one of the stranger information-technology developments of the past decade. The off-the-shelf computing technology available to anybody with a few bucks to spend (and in some cases without any bucks, as some of the best stuff is free) is significantly better than what large corporations provide their employees:
For a look at how sharp the divide between work and home can be, consider my experience. The Wall Street Journal gives me a laptop with Windows XP, an operating system I found satisfying when it came out eight years ago but that lacks a lot of modern touches, like a speedy file-search function. My home computer, meanwhile, is a two-year-old iMac running the Leopard version of Apple's Macintosh operating system. Among other virtues, it's got a search function called Spotlight that lets me track down files in a flash.
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Here's the kind of interesting stuff you can learn reading this morning's monthly foreign trade report from the Census Bureau:
Overall U.S. trade deficit for September: $36.5 billion
Trade deficit in petroleum products: $20.5 billion
Trade deficit with China: $22.1 billion
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Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius writes that bad times among small businesses, which are harder for government statisticians to measure than the doings of big businesses, probably means the economy is growing slower than the feds say it is:
We have argued that the weakness of the small business sector may mean that real GDP in the third quarter in fact grew more slowly than the 3.5% “advance” estimate. The reason is that the GDP data may not fully capture the performance of small firms, and specifically the formation and dissolution—i.e. the “birth” and “death”—of small firms ...
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The Wine Economist reports that Australia's overproduction of wine has reached a crisis point:
Australia has an accumulated surplus of 100 million cases of wine that will double in the next two years if current trends continue, according to the report. The annual surplus is huge – equal to all UK export sales and there is no clear prospect of finding additional demand, either domestic or foreign, to fill this gap. ...
The news that AIG CEO Robert Benmosche is thinking of leaving (now he says he's staying; see update below) because he's sick of dealing with those mean, mean federal regulators—especially the ones who want to cap his and his employees' pay—raised two conflicting thoughts:
1) The federal government isn't very good at running corporations.
2) Who the &%$#@ does Robert Benmosche think he is?
Read More…
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