Friday, January 28, 2011

YIELD CURVE PREDICTS: 1% GDP GROWTH, BUT NO RECESSION

by Cullen Roche

“Continuing a recent trend, the yield curve became steeper over the past month, as long rates increased nearly 0.2 percent, and short rates inched up. The three-month Treasury bill rate moved up to 0.15 percent—just above November and December’s 0.14 percent. The ten-year rate rose to 3.36 percent, up from December’s 3.18 percent and well above November’s 2.89 percent. The slope rose 17 basis points (bp), staying above 300 bp, a full 46 bp above November’s 255 bp.
Projecting forward using past values of the spread and GDP growth suggests that real GDP will grow at about a 1.0 percent rate over the next year, the same projection as in November and December. Although the time horizons do not match exactly, this comes in on the more pessimistic side of other forecasts, although, like them, it does show moderate growth for .....



U.S. Commercial Real Estate Market Moves on Healthcare

by Marian Anthony

Growing concern with higher commercial vacancy in the U.S. real estate market continues to weaken confidence while defaults in the Commercial Mortgage-backed Securities Market (CMBS) increase.
President Obama’s new healthcare bill is now encouraging more investors back into the commercial Healthcare real estate market. Some have moved on the growing opportunity as aging baby-boomers fuel the increasing demand for more long-term care facilities.
Healthcare REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust) have been identified as the next “hot ticket” for speculators in the distressed U.S. ...

IS THE CONSUMER REBOUND SUSTAINABLE?

by Cullen Roche

“The story within the story was the resurrection of the American consumer who lifted his/her spending at a 4.4% annual rate. This is the strongest gain since the first quarter of 2006, when credit was flowing freely, unemployment of 4.5% was triggering sizeable organic wage growth and rallies in both equities and housing were generating personal wealth, at least on paper. It would be a bit dangerous to extrapolate what we just saw in the fourth quarter because the QE2 juice squeezed by Uncle Ben generated a sizeable wealth effect that helped pull down the savings rate from 5.9% in the third quarter to 5.4% in the fourth (it should NOT be lost on anyone that real consumer spending at +4.4% growth managed to more than double the comparatively sluggish 1.8% annualized increase in real disposable income). Strip out this non-recurring factor and real GDP growth would have come in closer to a ho-hum 2.8% annual rate last quarter. That actually is not really that impressive for a sixth quarter of post-recession recovery, when real GDP growth is typically chugging along at roughly ......

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Help! We’ve fallen and we can’t get up!

By Barry Ritholtz

Today seems to be the first day the major indices have fallen, and are unable to muster a rally.
It is still early — its only noon EST as I type this — but I don’t get a feel for the market’s ability to come charging back.  That’s no surprise, given the over-extended over bought condition we find ourselves in.
Note that the Nasdaq (QQQQ) and the Russell 2000 (IWM) are leading tot he downside.
Hence, the news flow may amount to little more than an opportunity to pullback, consolidate, and work off some excesses of recent weeks. We will have a better sense as the correction unfolds if this is a minor (8-12%) pullback, something less, or something more.
Stay tuned . . .
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Deutsche Bank CEO: Bailout Risk Lurks for Hedge Funds

          By: MoneyNews.com
Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann said unregulated financial companies such as hedge funds may pose a systemic risk to the economy if oversight isn’t increased.
“You have an unregulated area which becomes — as a consequence of all the regulatory changes — more and more important,” Ackermann, 62, said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “You may one day wake up and realize that the systemic challenges are so big that you will have to bail out or at least help support the unregulated sector.”
Ackermann’s warning echoes comments made by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who said this week in Davos that regulators haven’t paid enough attention to problems that could emerge in “a large, less healthy buccaneer sector.” Hedge funds have dodged the brunt of new global banking regulation aimed at avoiding a repeat of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.
“If you separate utility banks from casino banking, you will one day realize that casino banks are also counterparties to corporations but also to other banks and to asset management and to governments,” Ackermann said yesterday. “It would be somewhat naïve to assume that if you have a strong regulated sector and leave the unregulated in the open, that you will never have systemic risk.”
 

Survivor Trading System - Trades of 27 January

I trades di Survivor System del 27 Gennaio. I risultati real-time sono a disposizione al seguente link: http://www.box.net/shared/5vajnzc4cp  

Trades of Survivor System on 27 January. Real-time results are available at the following link: http://www.box.net/shared/5vajnzc4cp

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