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Archive for the ‘Interest Rates’ Category

The banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, and balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery.  – Robert Reich

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Now that all asset classes including:

property
equities, mutual funds
bonds
cash/currencies/money market funds
commodities

have gotten hammered, and the US dollar has rallied due to mass redemptions of foreign investments, an optimal position is in physical gold and silver. The paper market of gold is 2.5 times the size of the physical market, and with the IMF and others selling [...]

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Michael Perry [CEO of IndyMac] called the markets for mortgage securities “panicked and illiquid” in a letter to employees Thursday.
He said the lender has “very strong liquidity, a good amount of excess capital,” and added that “there are no realistic scenarios that I can foresee that would impair IndyMac’s viability.”
He goes on to say that [...]

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I think that this will collapse the bond market regardless of whether they actually put it on the books. The implied guarantee is too well understood by the financial community. The government can always change its obligations on SS and Medicare. Those are not contractual.  They are legislative, and more importantly, they are not owed [...]

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This deleveraging process has been a very unique one. Over the last decade, the Fed led many central banks around the world in an unprecedented expansion of money supply. While there is massive credit being withdrawn from the global system, the long-term effects of this money supply expansion has yet to filter through. Investors are [...]

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In a quarterly filing today, Merrill Lynch & Co. dislosed that Level III assets had jumped to nearly $70 billion, an increase of 70% over the same quarter of 2007.  The firm also stated that more than $16 billion of this exposure is related to subprime.  Definitely a sign of things to come though relative [...]

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Goldman helped arrange the $7 billion in financing for Washington Mutual announced last week by a consortium led by TPG. Yet, Goldman’s research group predicts another $23 billion in losses (revising upward the projected per share loss for last year from $1.00 to $3.30), and is recommending a short sale of the stock (we [...]

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In January of 2007, we made macro predictions about how to allocate assets for the coming 5 years in “Our Investment Calls for 2012.” Overall, our recommendations were pretty spot on as you can see from the table below.
One glaring area though where we were totally off is with interest rates. Boy, were [...]

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March 3, 2008 (Motley Fool) – Right now, things look bad. Every day, the economic news looks worse. Unemployment has been creeping up. The service sector is shrinking for the first time in half a decade. Consumer confidence is declining.
The stock market’s performance of late reflects this news. The S&P 500 is down nearly 9% [...]

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