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By now, you are familiar with the carry trade, where one borrows in one’s own currency in order to invest in higher yielding foreign assets, often times with significant leverage. The Japanese were famous for making this trade in Australian Dollars, U.S. Dollars, you name it.
What a lot of people don’t realize that everyone [...]

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When the Euro was formed, bond traders looked askance at Southern European sovereign debt, which trade at a considerable premium to debt from Germany, France and the Netherlands. In those days, the Southern European countries developed the offensive nickname PIGS (for Portgual, Italy, Greece, and Spain). But after EMU, those bonds converged to yield [...]

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Legg Mason unit to cut one-third of jobs – FT AlphavilleReuters reports Legg Mason plans to cut a third of the jobs at a unit run by value stock picker Bill Miller after its assets more than halved this year.
The Economist endorses . . . – Barry RitholtzGee, do you think Europe is looking for [...]

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CBS posts $12.5 billion loss with writedown – Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) – CBS Corp reported a massive quarterly loss on Thursday, as a rapidly deteriorating advertising market tarnished the TV and radio broadcaster’s results and the economic crisis prompted it to take a $14 billion non-cash charge.
Global stocks rise on [...]

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This post is a guide to understanding the GDP deflator, which the government uses to arrive at the economic growth numbers we all hear on TV or read about in the newspaper. This post is the product of a lot of background research and some good confirmatory side conversations on the topic [...]

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No change. That’s what we see from this week’s jobless claims numbers. The 4-week average number is up 145,750 from a year ago. That’s a bonus because three weeks ago this number was 166,500 and has fallen for three weeks on the trot. However, the continuing claims numbers keep rising in relation [...]

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So the numbers are in and the U.S. economy shrank 0.3% n the third quarter. That is a low number, but it is better than expected. The U.S. economy looks like it is in recession based on these numbers.
However, before we go away thinking that’s the answer, let’s dig a little deeper. [...]

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I won’t be able to comment here until later today when I will update this post. But I wanted to report that U.S. GDP shrank 0.3% in Q3, less than the 0.5% median forecast. Now, when it comes to government statistics like GDP, the devil’s in the details. One detail is the inflation [...]

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As we head into the final stretch leading up to the U.S. presidential election, I wanted to throw a thought out there about experience and judgment. I have long been of the view that natural bias toward one or the other has a lot to do with personality type and plays a big role [...]

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This morning, the markets are looking wonderful. All the Asian markets were up with the Nikkei (Japan), Kospi (S. Korea) and Hang Seng (Hong Kong) up 10%+. The European markets were way up right out of the gate. And despite bad GDP figures coming this morning out of the U.S. at 8:30ET, .S. [...]