Investing

Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, has an intriguing opinion article in the Sunday New York Times about the link between big business and fascism. He makes the case that a lack of anti-trust enforcement has contributed to the rise of populism around the world. I don't know...

Tuesday's election result was about as expected as you can get in markets. The accepted wisdom going into the election was that Democrats would take control of the House of Representatives and Republicans would retain control of the Senate. Sure, there were scattered articles by Democratic partisans predicting -...

Stocks have stumbled into October with the S&P 500 down about 6% as I write this. The source of equity investors' angst is always hard to pinpoint and this is no exception but this correction doesn't seem to be due to concerns about economic growth. At least not directly. The...

One of my favorite financial writers, Edward Chancellor, has posted this article over at ThinkMarkets, an NYU economic blog. Chancellor is the author of Devil Take The Hindmost: A History Of Financial Speculation, by far the most literate book ever written on financial manias. Yes, Chancellor says, the US is...

Stocks have gone up a lot in this expansion but so have earnings – on an almost one for one basis. But earnings are volatile and we’ve seen this plenty of times before. In this article at Project Syndicate, Robert Shiller compares the current period to the 1920s and other...

I have been a fan of Japan as an investment for quite a while now. Shinzo Abe's economic reforms are, for now, paying large dividends. There are questions of course about monetary policy as implemented by the inventors of Quantitative Easing, taking monetary policy where it has rarely been....

Japan's stock market hasn't done much this year - the Nikkei is up about 4% YTD - but you can't blame that on poor corporate earnings growth. Earnings for the Nikkei are up about 30% year over year and profit margins are hitting new highs (from the FT): Shinzo Abe...