From the monthly archives:
Professor advises underwater homeowners to walk away from mortgages
Go ahead. Break the chains. Stop paying on your mortgage if you owe more than the house is worth. And most important: Don’t feel guilty about it. Don’t think you’re doing something morally wrong.
That’s the incendiary core message of a new academic paper by Brent T. White, [...]
Stockcharts.com had some interesting charts on the U.S. dollar, oil and the energy sector recently.
Here’s the first one …
About that chart, Stockcharts writes: “Despite strength in stocks and weakness in the Dollar, the US Oil Fund ETF (USO) is down for the month of November. It is not much, but it is still surprising and [...]
Scooters — not motorcycles — are one of the primary forms of transportation all around Asia.
One thing very different in Xian (and the rest of China) from Taipei, Jakarta, Bangkok, Singapore, Bangalore, and Ho Chi Ming is that the scooters are primarily electric instead of gasoline powered.
Honda and Suzuki supply most of those [...]
The news out of Dubai is roiling the global markets, threatening to send investors scurrying into the “safety” of the US dollar and gold lower. Dubai’s main development engine, Dubai World, will ask creditors for a standstill on paying back its $60 billion debt until at least May. In the short term, this surge into [...]
I had talked about the Chinese vaccine maker Sinovac (NYSE:SVA) before in positive terms but warned that they were already at peak production and therefore had very little upside.
Well…Sinovac solved that problem by creating a joint venture with an under-utilized Chinese pharmaceutical company to goose their production. Sinovac provides expertise plus cash and the [...]
As America stuff itself on turkey, let’s consider the rest of the agricultural commodity complex.
Chinese imports of soybeans are ramping up bigtime. Shipments may even eclipse this year’s record, thanks to Beijing’s pledge to keep shoring up local prices and a pick-up in soymeal demand.
In fact, China has bought 15.84 million metric tonnes of new [...]
The price of uranium per pound has fallen substantially from a peak midway through 2007 of about $140 to a recent trading range of $40-$50. Much of the fall can be blamed on the decline in electricity demand as the world moved towards recession. Nevertheless, the price of uranium has recently bounced, partly because of [...]
Who’s in charge of this market? The dollar? Gold? Oil? Or maybe Ol’ Doctor Copper …
Copper is called “Doctor Copper” because it tells the health of the economy. Doctor Copper’s Rx is looking pretty good so far. We already have the iPath Copper ETF (JJC: 46.31 -0.39%) in Red-Hot Commodity ETFs, with nice open gains.
And for [...]
