Stocks

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...

Elon Musk's lack of self control has finally bought Tesla a real problem. Does Tesla survive without Musk? That's a harder question to answer than it seems at first blush. The stock price is intimately intertwined with the aura of Elon Musk. Without him, Tesla is just a money...

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...