How Aldi, a brutally efficient grocery chain, is beating Walmart on low prices. Running a supermarket in America has never been harder. Profits are razor thin. Online shopping and home delivery are changing the way people buy their food. Dollar stores and drugstores are selling more groceries. Pressures are so intense that regional chains like Southeastern Grocers, the owner of Winn-Dixie and Bi-Lo, filed for bankruptcy.
Large companies increasingly control the industry, which had long operated as a dispersed network of smaller, local grocers. And even Walmart — the largest player of all — faces new competition from Amazon, which bought Whole Foods in 2017 for almost $14 billion. But when Walmart’s US CEO Greg Foran invokes words like “fierce,” “good” and “clever” in speaking almost admiringly about one of his competitors, he’s not referring to Amazon. Foran is describing Aldi, the no-frills German discount grocery chain that’s growing aggressively in the United States and reshaping the industry along the way. But Aldi has built a cult-like following. 25-cent deposit.
Are you a robot? - The Washington Post. Student Loans. The perils of trying to time the market - Buttonwood. It's the Worst Time to Make Money in Markets Since 1972. Market statisticians are falling over each other in 2018 to describe the pain being felt across asset classes. One venerable shop frames it this way: Things haven’t been this bad since Richard Nixon’s presidency. Ned Davis Research puts markets into eight big asset classes — everything from bonds to U.S. and international stocks to commodities. And not a single one of them is on track to post a return this year of more than 5 percent, a phenomenon last observed in 1972, according to Ed Clissold, a strategist at the firm.
In terms of losses, investors have seen far worse. But going by the breadth of assets failing to deliver upside, 2018 is starting to look historic. Nothing’s working, not large or small-cap stocks in the U.S., not international or emerging equities, not Treasuries, investment-grade bonds, commodities or real estate. That’s all but unique in history. Clissold has a villain: evaporating central bank stimulus. — With assistance by Brendan Walsh.
Denmark-skat-tax-scandal. The Next Financial Crisis Is Staring Us in the Face. The financial crisis ripped through Wall Street 10 years ago, pushing the global economy to the edge of the abyss. One might think those searing experiences would have created a learning opportunity — for managing risk better, understanding structural imbalances in the financial markets, even learning a bit about how our own cognitive processes malfunction. Instead, we have little new wisdom or self-awareness to show for that traumatic event.
That was one of the key takeaways of an extraordinary conference I attended last week called Risk: Retrospective Lessons & Prospective Strategies, co-sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute and Morgan Stanley in New York. It left me excited, brimming with ideas and curious about how we could do better as investors. I took notes — and I never take notes. Every discussion topic had profound implications for the capital markets. We tend to forget just how shocking that period was. The panel on behavioral finance was similarly thought-provoking. Another economic downturn is just a matter of time - The next recession. JUST SOUTH of Indiana’s border with Michigan lies the city of Elkhart, with a population of just over 50,000. Apart from a small, shop-lined high street near where one river, the Elkhart, flows into another, the St Joseph, the city is mostly shapeless, tree-lined and suburban.
Scattered around the outskirts are the factories of several of America’s largest producers of recreational vehicles (RVs). Rows of the finished products rest outside the giant sheds in which they are made. Modern RVs are impressive, leather-upholstered land yachts fitted with flat-screen televisions and gas fireplaces, the perfect vessels in which to navigate the American continent. The RV business is one of the economy’s most strongly cyclical. Sales of big-ticket items like homes and cars inevitably rise and fall with the business cycle, but RVs are especially susceptible to such swings. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. But for how long? New world disorder. Choice page. How to spot the next recession. Sign Up for Our free email newsletters When will the next recession hit?
That seems to be a question on everyone's mind. It's been almost 10 years since the official end of the Great Recession, which makes the current expansion one of the longest in a century. At the same time, interest rates are rising, the stock market just had its biggest wipeout in years, and Google searches for "next recession" have jumped. The longer a recovery goes on, the more people inevitably start wondering when the party will stop. Unfortunately, there's no surefire way to predict the next crash. 1.
This is the difference between the returns on U.S. There are lots of spreads you could choose from. At any rate, the spread is pretty low right now: 2. This is a fancy term for the difference between returns on 10-year Treasuries and two-year Treasuries. That's the dreaded "inverted yield curve," and it's reliably predicted the last five recessions. 3. Take the quits rate. 4. 5. For the moment, at least. Stocks Are Nosediving. Is a Recession Coming? Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth? Adjusted for inflation, the US economy has more than doubled in real terms since 1975. How much of that growth has gone to the average person? According to many economists, the answer is close to zero. In a recent gloomy study of the American economy, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman find that almost none of the gains from economic growth accrued to the bottom half of the population.
They write, “Looking first at income before taxes and transfers, income stagnated for bottom 50% earners: for this group, average pre-tax income was $16,000 in 1980 — expressed in 2014 dollars, using the national income deflator — and still is $16,200 in 2014.”¹ Piketty, Saez, and Zucman also found that incomes of the top 1% tripled over the same time period. New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, reacting to this work, concluded “the very affluent, and only the very affluent, have received significant raises in recent decades.”
But the people in the snapshots are not the same people. "Should I pay off my mortgage?" Five thing to consider before you do. The next recession - The world economy. JUST a year ago the world was enjoying a synchronised economic acceleration. In 2017 growth rose in every big advanced economy except Britain, and in most emerging ones. Global trade was surging and America booming; China’s slide into deflation had been quelled; even the euro zone was thriving. In 2018 the story is very different. This week stockmarkets tumbled across the globe as investors worried, for the second time this year, about slowing growth and the effects of tighter American monetary policy. Those fears are well-founded. The world economy’s problem in 2018 has been uneven momentum (see article).
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. This divergence between America and the rest means divergent monetary policies, too. Emerging markets account for 59% of the world’s output (measured by purchasing power), up from 43% just two decades ago, when the Asian financial crisis hit. Cutting-room floors Spending ceilings. Quant Investor Cliff Asness Hasn’t Smashed His Screen This Year—Yet. Billionaire, blogger, charismatic quant, and fount of Twitter rage: That’s Clifford Asness. Over 20 years, the former Goldman Sachs managing director and graduate student of Nobel laureate Eugene Fama has built AQR Capital Management into a systematic investing giant by capitalizing on two trends: the growing power of computers and demand for lower fund fees.
Today, AQR runs $226 billion in strategies built on so-called factors—behaviors that securities tend to exhibit over time. The problem is the “over time” qualifier. Asness, who turns 52 in October, is having such a miserable 2018 that he penned a 23-page essay defending AQR’s faith in factors. ERIK SCHATZKER: The performance of quants in 2018 has turned some faithful into skeptics and raised doubts as to whether some of these strategies are still viable. CLIFF ASNESS: There might be a minor crisis in confidence for some. There may be investment strategies that never, ever, ever have bad periods. Are the strategies too expensive? The Most Important Least-Noticed Economic Event of the Decade. Sometimes the most important economic events announce themselves with huge front-page headlines, stock market collapses and frantic intervention by government officials. Other times, a hard-to-explain confluence of forces has enormous economic implications, yet comes and goes without most people even being aware of it.
In 2015 and 2016, the United States experienced the second type of event. There was a sharp slowdown in business investment, caused by an interrelated weakening in emerging markets, a drop in the price of oil and other commodities, and a run-up in the value of the dollar. The pain was confined mostly to the energy and agricultural sectors and to the portions of the manufacturing economy that supply them with equipment. Overall economic growth slowed but remained in positive territory.
Yet understanding this slump — think of it as a mini-recession — is important in many ways. It helps explain the economic growth spurt of the last two years. The mini-recession defies neatness.
The Yield Curve and Predicted GDP Growth. Where even Walmart won't go: how Dollar General took over rural America | Business. When Dollar General came to Haven, Kansas, it arrived making demands. The fastest-growing retailer in America wanted the taxpayers of the small, struggling Kansas town to pick up part of the tab for building one of its squat, barebones stores that more often resemble a warehouse than a neighbourhood shop. Dollar General thought Haven’s council should give the company a $72,000 break on its utility bills, equivalent to the cost of running the town’s library and swimming pool for a year, on the promise of jobs and tax revenues.
The council blanched but ended up offering half of that amount to bring the low-price outlet to a town that already had a grocery store. “Dollar General are a force. The Dollar General opened in Haven at the end of February 2015. Buhler’s mayor, Daniel Friesen, watched events unfold in Haven and came to see Dollar General not so much as an opportunity as a diagnosis.
Dollar General is opening stores at the rate of three a day across the US. “This isn’t a rich town. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy? Yc 20180628. Overview of the Latest Yield Curve Figures In June the yield curve twisted and flattened, with short rates moving up and long rates moving down. The 3-month (constant maturity) Treasury bill rate rose to 1.94 percent (for the week ending June 22), up slightly from May’s 1.92 percent, which was up a bit more from April’s 1.81 percent. The 10-year rate (also constant maturity) dropped back below 3 percent and finished at 2.91 percent, below May’s 3.01 percent but still a bit above April’s 2.88 percent. These changes dropped the slope to 97 basis points, reversing May’s increase to 109 basis points and down 10 basis points from April’s 107 basis points. Overall, the incoming data had only a minimal impact on expectations of growth.
The flatter yield curve had a slightly more visible effect on the estimated probability of recession, which increased a bit. The Yield Curve as a Predictor of Economic Growth Predicting GDP Growth Predicting the Probability of Recession. Compound Interest and Compounding Growth: A Comprehensive Guide -- The Motley Fool. S understand little about the causes of growth - Free exchange: Root and branch. Why stocks could fall nearly 40% over the coming 18 months. Tesla is just months from a total collapse, says hedge-fund manager. Buffett to Berkshire Shareholders: Be Prepared to Lose Half Your Money. Few investors can match the track record of investing performance that Warren Buffett has achieved, and longtime shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A)(NYSE: BRK-B) know firsthand how successful long-term investing can result in life-changing wealth. Yet the Oracle of Omaha has gone through both good times and bad, and rather than giving into the prevailing attitude among market participants that the nine-year-old bull market could continue indefinitely, Buffett's latest annual letter to shareholders warns Berkshire investors that losses of 50% or more are not only possible but inevitable in the future.
The ups and downs of Berkshire stock Buffett would be the first to tell you that Berkshire has seen extraordinary returns over time. Between 1965 and 2017, the company has grown its book value at a 19% average annual rate, and that has translated into share-price gains of nearly 21% per year on average. Image source: The Motley Fool. How to profit from big losses. How to invest money in 2018: The best beginner’s investment plan, with funds, stocks, bonds and more. Perhaps you’ve heard that to really grow your money, you need to start investing.
But does just the thought of the topic make you feel anxious? You’re not alone: 62% of younger investors say they feel overwhelmed simply by all the options available to them, according to a recent Scottrade survey. It’s the classic problem of the tyranny of choice: Having too many options makes actually picking one feel like more work than it needs to be. And there is a lot of choice out there for investors — including stocks, bonds, real estate, mutual funds, exchange traded funds and much more. Even when you just look at stocks and all the different ways you could mix them into an index, Bloomberg notes that you’d likely have a googol of different combinations. Some good news? “There are deeply embedded human behaviors that are really dysfunctional when it comes to investing in financial markets,” Greenwald said. So how do you invest intelligently, if slowly? 1. 2. Still, you might feel unmotivated. 3.
Opinion | The Real Reason the Investor Class Hates Pensions. No issue in America today better illustrates the divergent interests of working Americans and the 1 percent than pension reform. Substantial empirical evidence shows that America’s favored retirement vehicle — the 401(k), recently renounced by its own inventors — is grossly inadequate and will leave tens of millions of Americans with insufficient retirement assets. And yet states and cities are busy converting traditional pensions into these failing 401(k)s or equivalents, to the great benefit of money managers and the finance class.
Advocates of pension “reform” — which really means cutting or eliminating traditional pension funds — will tell you that such funds are a big drain on state and local budgets, since, as defined-benefit programs, they are obligated to pay workers a defined amount in their retirement. But that’s largely a question of political priorities; underfunded pensions are the result of, well, decades of underfunding pensions. How to Save Money on Groceries. Regardless of whether you're feeding just yourself or a whole family, you probably find that groceries take a big bite out of your paycheck.
Food is the third-largest household expense, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. And for a family of four, the average monthly tab runs between $568 for the super thrifty to $1,293 for those on a more liberal budget, according to the USDA. MONEY consulted supermarket-savings experts for strategies that would help you trim the fat, without giving up the foods you love. Employing just a few of these 29 tricks—because let's face it, you hardly have time to cook let alone turn shopping into a project—can take your bills down by 25%. In other words, you could realize between $1,700 and $3,900 in annual savings.
Now that's pretty delicious. Plan Ahead 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Get the Best Price 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. ...then deploy them wisely. 12. 13. 14. Be Smarter in the Store 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. Save on Specifics 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. The Most Important Move to Make If You Want to Retire Early - 1. Lifehacker. Ricardo Hausmann advises poor countries not to focus solely on adding value t... Most Competitive Economies 2014. ELI5: Why must businesses constantly grow? Why can't they just self-sustain? : explainlikeimfive. 76 ways to make money in digital media: A list from Slate’s former editor. I Will Teach You To Be Rich: A Solid Intro to Money Management. The Disengagement Economy, by Robert Hall, Huffington Post.
The Biggest Tax Scam Ever. 38 maps that explain the global economy. Best Cities Economist Intelligence Unit. Who Wants to Be a Russian Billionaire? Business Insider. Ultra-realistic Fantasy Dolls. It's Scary How Real They Look. Paying off debt without going broke - CNN.url. Http---www.wisegeek.com-what-is-the-historical-price-of-gold.htm.url. Wall Street banks can’t visualize a world without themselves. Business Insider. Satoshi's Genius: Unexpected Ways in which Bitcoin Dodged Some Cryptographic Bullets.
How to Get Student Discounts Forever. Business Insider. The Best Things to Buy In November. The Outsiders Who Saw Our Economic Future. The Laptops Worth Buying This Holiday Season. Warning Signs Flash as Stock Market Soars to Records. Business Insider. How Can the New York Times Endorse an Agreement the Public Can't Read? Australian bitcoin user TradeFortress says site hacked, $1 million in virtual currency stolen.
How to talk like an estate agent – seven tips. Business Insider. Business Insider. How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers. Business Insider. Business Insider. Business Insider. Business Insider. How I Saved $60K for Retirement on a $40K Salary. 7 Towns Where Land is Free - Yahoo! Real Estate.url. Five Reasons to Open a Chinese Bank Account - WSJ.com.url. Digging out from $80,000 in debt - CNN.url. Http---shine.yahoo.com-financially-fit-7-deadly-financial-sins-203700166.html.url. GOLD BULLION, SILVER BARS, PLATINUM Gold Krugerrand,American Gold Eagles.url. Silver Bull Seasonals.url.
Silver - Prepare for the Flood - Seeking Alpha.url. My Adventures in Self Reliance Why I buy Silver.url. Secrets-to-maximizing-social-security Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.url. Savings-run-out-retirement-wsj Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.url. Do-it-yourself-laundry-detergent Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.url. The-new-credit-card-tricks Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.url. Imf-bombshell-age-america-end-marketwatch Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.url. 5-ways-to-quickly-boost-your-credit-score Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.url. Delhi: Business Class Upgrades and Goat Brain Curry | Page 2 of 4 | A Taste Of The Road. Detroit gets all the press, but Pittsburgh is the Rust Belt’s unsung startup hub. Where to buy Oticon nEARcom? Countries With Largest Gold Reserves. Euro zone economy grinds to halt even before Russia sanctions bite. How to manage all your financial affairs from a $20 mobile phone.
Oppenheimer Investment Strategy July 2014. The Top 7 Management Tips From Harvard Business Review. Predicting A Future Free Of Dollar Bills.