Home | Brazilian Bubble. Narratively: Local stories, artfully told. Bloomberg Anywhere Login. Ijapicap. Japan economy | Macro economy | Economist - GDP, Inflation - Analysis on Japanese economy by Mr. Takuji Okubo. Near zero growth in 2015 In our view, the Japanese economy is entering a period of low growth through the second half of 2014 to 2016. We forecast that the real GDP growth will decelerate from 1.5% in 2013 to 1.0% in 2014, followed by a barely positive growth of 0.4% in 2015. Growth in Japan turning south from April 2014 Japan has enjoyed a period of robust growth, lasting more than a year, till early 2014. However, Q2 2014 would be the turning point for the economy. As a result of the consumption tax rate hike and weaker yen, consumers are facing a steep rise in the price of goods and services in Japan. Policy makers seem out of touch with the reality. In early 2015, Prime Minister Abe will face a difficult choice of whether to cancel the scheduled consumption tax rate hike to 10% in October 2015.
Upside and downside risk to our outlook There are a number of potential sources of upside/downside risks to our main forecast. The Verge. The price of everything. “..Fed and ECB policies aim to reassure financial market participants rather than keeping them guessing. In the “good old days”, before quantitative easing, forward guidance and zero real interest rates, investors, asset managers, traders and bankers were forced to make difficult but educated guesses about the opportunities and vulnerabilities in financial markets. The danger of making a bad guess was, and should remain, an important restraint on excesses and systemic risk. “Today’s market participants are babied with excessively explicit “forward guidance”, supported by historically low interest rates and yields (especially in real terms) and central bank purchases if markets weaken. Such a “safety net” makes investors and traders so complacent they panic at any hint of normalised yield curves and real interest rates, as occurred in bond markets when chairman Ben Bernanke dared mention “tapering” in May 2013 and today’s downturn in emerging markets.
To read more, Financial Market Outlook for 2013. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has just bought a second home, this one in the Hamptons, the fabled playground for New York’s bankers and hedge fund managers. It was on the market for $33 million, and its sale in December contributed to a splurge of estate buying last year that saw record prices being set for country manors in the Hamptons. The luxury segment of the real estate market in the US had a very good year, and not just in New York. California mansions which would have sat idle two or three years ago were being snapped up in weeks, with multiple bidders pushing offers up well beyond the asking price. Nor were expensive properties subject to a buyers’ frenzy.
All throughout the US, once-devastated real estate markets saw a remarkable recovery in sales volume. San Diego was up 13%, Los Angeles 15%, and on the east coast Boston rebounded 24%. Where did all of the property go? So who are the buyers? If all this sounds like a rather warped and distorted market, you are right. Work.
September | 2014 | S O L A R C Y C L E S. Insights and Research. Scott E.D. Skyrm. Blog > Detail. The new deal on Cyprus does not only have the right intentions, but averts the two major flaws of the previous deal: It fully protects insured deposits up to the €100,000 amount guaranteed by deposit insurance in all banks, andIt bails-in all bondholders and shareholders. The deal has other remarkable elements as well: Marfin Laiki Popular Bank (the second biggest bank accounting for about one-third of banking assets in Cyprus), the most troubled bank, will be closed down immediately with full contribution of shareholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors.
The deal is victory of common sense. Taxpayers should not foot the bill for private-sector losses. It was also a sensible decision of not introducing capital controls (even though we need to see the temporariness of the unspecified administrative measures). It was also wise resolving banks one-by-one and not distributing the burden of the losses of some banks to all other banks. Republishing and referencing. Ppola Comment: A central bank crisis.
Vox has an excellent article by the LSE's De Grauwe about the austerity measures in the Eurozone periphery that were imposed by policymakers in response to a buyer's strike among sovereign bond investors. As yields soared, particularly in Greece, there was a growing belief that the cause was high levels of public debt and structural inefficiencies, and that to bring yields down it was necessary to slash public borrowing and make structural reforms. There was also concern about the lack of competitiveness of periphery economies and their high unit labour costs: had they had their own currencies, devaluation would have been the corrective for this problem, but because of the Euro this was not possible and the only solution was to force down wages. The measures adopted in a number of countries to reduce public deficits and force down wages caused GDP to collapse across the Eurozone.
And they are still causing it. Related links: How the Bitcoin protocol actually works. Many thousands of articles have been written purporting to explain Bitcoin, the online, peer-to-peer currency. Most of those articles give a hand-wavy account of the underlying cryptographic protocol, omitting many details. Even those articles which delve deeper often gloss over crucial points. My aim in this post is to explain the major ideas behind the Bitcoin protocol in a clear, easily comprehensible way. We’ll start from first principles, build up to a broad theoretical understanding of how the protocol works, and then dig down into the nitty-gritty, examining the raw data in a Bitcoin transaction. Understanding the protocol in this detailed way is hard work. It is tempting instead to take Bitcoin as given, and to engage in speculation about how to get rich with Bitcoin, whether Bitcoin is a bubble, whether Bitcoin might one day mean the end of taxation, and so on.
That’s fun, but severely limits your understanding. It may seem surprising that Bitcoin’s basis is cryptography. To . The Diplomat Magazine. China has made dramatic economic progress during the last five years, weathering the global financial crisis and becoming the world’s largest exporter and second largest economy, surpassing Japan. By James A. Dorn for The Diplomat November 29, 2013 Facebook0 Twitter0 Google+0 LinkedIn0 China has made dramatic economic progress during the last five years, weathering the global financial crisis and becoming the world’s largest exporter and second largest economy, surpassing Japan. China’s authoritarian development model appears robust, generating high real growth year after year. The flaws in China’s development model will become increasingly evident as inflationary pressures build, differences in rural-urban living standards mount, a growing middle class demands an end to censorship, capital controls narrowly limit investment alternatives, land rights are strictly curtailed, and freedom of movement is infringed upon by a draconian internal passport system.
James A. The Atlantic Cities. Noahpinion. SNB & CHF: A beleaguered central bank in the dangerous world of global macro and euro crisis » The Swiss National Bank and Swiss Franc Blog. Current Archive. Fact Set. S&P 500 Index - S&P Dow Jones Indices. GMO. Teach/Me Data Analysis. Scaling of data may be useful and/or necessary under certain circumstances (e.g. when variables span different ranges). There are several different versions of scaling, the most important of which are listed below. Scaling procedures may be applied to the full data matrix, or to parts of the matrix only (e.g. columnwise). Range Scaling Range scaling transforms the values to another range which usually includes both a shift and a change of the scale (magnification, or reduction). The data samples are transformed according to the following equation: Mean Centering Subtracting the mean of the data is often called "mean centering".
Y = X - m Standardization Standardization (sometimes also called autoscaling) is the scaling procedure which results in a zero mean and unit variance of any descriptor variable. Y = ( X - m) / s Last Update: 2005-Jul-16. Crestmont Research. Japan Investment as percent of GDP. Research | Artemis Capital Management. CFA Institute Conference Proceedings Quarterly January 2014 | Vol. 31 | No. 1 The following is the abstract from the article “Volatility: The Market Price of Uncertainty” by Christopher Cole from Artemis Capital Management LLC. Today’s securities markets are pricing in yesterday’s crash, the known unknown, rather than tomorrow’s unknown unknown. To understand volatility as an asset class is to value the forward expectation of uncertainty, which is as much a function of human psychology as it is an expression of mathematics. Since the financial crisis, the pricing of volatility derivatives has undergone wide-scale changes that reflect classic behavioral biases.
Not only is volatility an asset class, but in fact, it may end up being the most important asset class for institutional portfolios over the next decade. To download the full article published in January 2014, click here. To download the full article published on October 4, 2012 click here. Economics. Bill Mitchell Blog. Weblog and Essays. Let's Clear Up One Confusion About Bitcoin November 3, 2017 If bitcoin can be converted into fiat currencies at a lower transaction cost than the fiat-to-fiat conversions made by banks and credit card companies, it's a superior means of exchange. One of the most common comments I hear from bitcoin skeptics goes something like this:Bitcoin isn't real money until I can buy a cup of coffee with it. In other words, bitcoin fails the first of the two core tests of "money": that it is a means of exchange and a store of value.
If we can't buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin, it obviously doesn't qualify as a means of exchange. The confusion here is the same one that plagues the conventional understanding of the foreign exchange markets: people confuse exchange and convertibility, which are both flows, i.e. transactions. Here's an illustration of the difference. Let's say Hipster Coffee Bar accepts payment in bitcoin (BTC) for a cup of coffee. Consider a credit card. What is privilege? Edelweiss Journal - Issues. Vox Web Portal. TF Market Advisors. JamesTown Foundation. PLA Joint Operations Developments and Military Reform April 9, 2014 During recent high-level political meetings, Chinese leaders have made repeated calls for “military reform.” While these speeches have given little detail about the content of such reform, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in...
Category: China Brief, Home Page, Military/Security, China and the Asia-Pacific, China Facing Grain Shortfalls, China Asserts Self-Sufficiency Policy Demand for food in China is increasing at an unprecedented rate, as the Chinese become wealthier. Category: China Brief, Home Page, Domestic/Social, Economics, China and the Asia-Pacific, China Sunflowers in Springtime: Taiwan’s Crisis and the End of an Era in Cross-Strait Cooperation With two years left in the second and last term of Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, Taiwan has been embroiled in a political crisis since March 18 that will have serious, and possibly long-lasting, repercussions on the dynamics within...
March 20, 2014 Previous Articles. Lowy Institute. FINANCIAL SENSE | Applying Common Sense to the Markets. International ETFs | ETF MarketPro. Investment case US Stocks When you step back and take a look at US Equity performance for this decade, you pretty quickly come to the conclusion that there's gotta be a better way. After the dot com bubble burst, the S&P 500 has taken its time to climb back to year 2000 levels, finally getting there in October 2007. Then, just when we thought we were above water, along comes 2008.
So the 2000s have not been kind to US stocks. International Stocks Over the same time period international stocks also bottomed out in 1993, but the recovery for international was faster and went beyond Year 2000 levels. So if you haven't been in international stocks, chances are you are still looking back fondly on your account statements from 8 years ago. But what about the downward slide we are seeing in 2008? Single Year Performance In this chart, you see a of summary single year performance over a 10 year period for 3 international markets and the S&P 500. Overview Organization Framework Top 6 International ETFs 1. Hoisington. Value Investing | Value Investor. Fed President - Taxes. My Investing Notebook. ZeroHedge.
Marc to Market. Naked capitalism. Sober Look. Mish. Macro Business. For a long time, we have suggested that because of China’s GDP growth being driven primarily by investment, the end result will inevitably be over-capacity. This has been apparent in industries such a ssteel, machinery and others (now even Caterpillar is exporting overcapacity in China, so to speak). We also believe that the construction boom after the 2008/09 stimulus has already led to over-building of residential real estate. The only problem we all have is that there are no accurate official statistics in China (like those in the US) that we are aware of for capacity utilisation.
A recent staff report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows an estimate of capacity utilisation in China. Interestingly, according to IMF’s estimation, China has been operating below capacity (albeit not unreasonably) even at the peak right before the 2008/09 financial crisis, and that was supported by external demand which no longer quite exists now. From the IMF (page 24 box 8 of Staff Report): The Big Picture. PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM. The Abenomics train has charged out of the station.
This article has been corrected. Markets are cheering the results of Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s first policy meeting. Kuroda, installed by prime minister Shinzo Abe, has convinced the rest of the central bank it is time to launch an aggressive monetary easing program to pull Japan out of decades of recession and deflation. The BoJ is going to purchase a massive $746 billion worth of bonds a month—double the current rate—to flood the economy with cash. That could help the central bank reach its 2% inflation target, and would be a huge achievement, as Japanese consumer prices have been on a slow and steady crawl downwards since 1997. The central bank also announced plans to temporarily suspend the so-called bank note rule, which kept government bond purchases below the amount of currency in circulation. Japanese stocks rose almost 1% after Kuroda gave investors much of what they wanted. Japan’s is the world’s most indebted government.
Humble Student of the Markets. The Options and Volatility ETPs Landscape. For several years I have publishing a graphical overview of the VIX ETPs landscape, with all the ETPs plotted on the basis of leverage and target maturity, such as the recent VIX ETP Returns for 2012. Lately, however, an expanding crop of options and volatility ETPs has been taking root in a space that is closer to the VIX products than any of the other ETPs. I talked about the low volatility ETPs at some length in yesterday’s Beyond SPLV: The Expanding Universe of Low Volatility ETPs. The graphic below is a plot of these securities, with the their geography, market cap and asset class in the rows and strategy/approach in the columns. I have talked about PBP in this space and was particularly interested to see that the buy-write / covered call approach is now being applied to gold in the form of the recent launch of GLDI.
Part of what prompted today’s approach is the launch of U.S. Equity High Volatility Put Write Index ETF (HVPW), which is the first put-write ETP on the market. Site Map. Investors Intelligence - technical analysis of stocks, ETFs, currencies and commodities. State of Working America. The Nifty Fifty Market | Pension Partners AdvisorBlog™ Salient. Sigmund Holmes — Investment Partners. Marginal REVOLUTION — Small Steps Towards A Much Better World. Wolf Street | Where the truth comes home to roost. Economic Policy Uncertainty Index. Cliff's Perspective. George Magnus | George Magnus – Economist and Author. Alphaville. Lex Live | A blog from the Financial Times. Chart of NYSE Composite vs % of NYSE Stocks Above 200-Day Moving Average » Stock Market Indicators. The Wall Street Examiner | Get the facts.
Alphaville » Long Room. Managed Funds Association | Risk Roadmap: Hedge Funds and Investors' Evolving Approach to Risk (BNY Mellon, Managed Funds Association, HedgeMark International. LLC) - Managed Funds Association -- MFA | The Voice of the Global Alternative Investment Indust. » About shadow PBOC. Long Short | John Authers takes the "Long View", while James Mackintosh the "Short View" on investment decisions. Latest gold news articles from Ross Norman of SharpsPixley.com. Gavyn Davies | Insight into macroeconomics and the financial markets from the Financial Times. The Wrong Growth Strategy for Japan by Martin Feldstein. Beyond Brics. Silberzahn & Jones. Truman Factor in English « Truman Factor. Global Macro Monitor | Monitoring the Global Economy. Jesse's Café Américain. China Daily.
Caixin Online – News and Analysis on China's Markets, Chinese Businesses and Economics. Caixin Online. Consuming Our Way to Prosperity is Macro Folly | The Business Desk with Paul Solman. Michael Pettis. China Economic Review | China Economic Review. Predictions For 2014--The Sinocism China Newsletter 01.05.14 | The Sinocism China Newsletter.
China. When the Growth Model Changes, Abandon the Correlations. Are Chinese companies sitting on the next debt crisis? Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) The PBoC’s monetary supremacy over Brazil (but don’t blame the Chinese) Gordonchang.com. Beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times. Publications.