10 Monday AM Reads

July 20, 2015 7:30am by

So much for a slow quiet summer! Start your week right with our expertly crafted morning train reads:

• Let’s Be Honest About Gold: It’s a Pet Rock (MoneyBeat) see also Gold Plunges to Lowest Since 2010 (Bloomberg)
• High Conviction Buybacks (investorfieldguide)
• What is so great about Warren Buffett? (Quora)
• Interpreting information in China’s stock markets  (M.Pettis)
• 6 surprising things the government spends way more on than the Pluto mission (Vox)

Continues here

 

 

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  1. VennData commented on Jul 20

    Gold is up from earlier lows

    – Zero Hedge

  4. swag commented on Jul 20

    David Cay Johnston

    Here’s How You Buy Out A Democracy

    Thanks to a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling Thursday, we now know how much it costs to buy a democracy: $10 million.

    That’s how much money right-wing donors spent to put four justices on the court, justices who just eviscerated Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws. Their ruling rests on a bizarre interpretation of First Amendment rights

    http://www.nationalmemo.com/heres-how-you-buy-out-a-democracy/

  6. reedsch commented on Jul 20

    IMHO, this is huge…
    http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/online-cheating-site-ashleymadison-hacked/

    Naturally, the aspect of blackmail on such a massive scale is what initially attracts one’s attention. But Google already knows what (almost) all of my sexual peccadillos are, as does the NSA. Methinks the entire concept of personal privacy and it’s corollaries, personal secrets, hidden desires, and the attendant deception of maintaining social relationships that are at odds with these, will be reexamined. We will just have to be less phony. I can’t be blackmailed if my pants are always down anyway.

  7. willid3 commented on Jul 20

    i guess some one finally admitted that the reason that wages and prices dont fall so much is that there are lots of long term costs that are sunk in long before an event that causes prices to not fall. all of us have things like mortgages, that mean we have to pay, and those costs dont go down. they are static. and that also explains why wages act they way they do. if they really want to change this (yeah right) they need to address the long term sunk costs

  8. Jojo commented on Jul 20

    Getting High on Their Own Supply
    Corporate stock buybacks put a floor under earnings
    Bloomberg Businessweek
    July 16, 2015

    Wall Street analysts are gloomy about corporate performance in the second quarter, predicting that profits fell 6.5 percent. If companies weren’t buying so much of their own stock, the drop could be much worse: 9 percent. “It makes you rethink a lot of things,” says Kevin Mahn, president of Hennion & Walsh Asset Management. “We question how much earnings growth has taken place because of actual sales growth and consumer spending—and how much is attributable to buybacks.”

    Corporations report profits as earnings per share (EPS). By reducing the number of shares outstanding, buybacks help increase a company’s EPS. The impact of buybacks was harder to see in the first three years of the bull market, when ballooning profit margins helped companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index almost double their earnings. Now that margin growth has flattened out, buybacks’ contribution is more significant. Companies in the S&P 500 bought more than $550 billion of their own stock last year, boosting EPS growth by 2.3 percentage points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

    …

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-16/corporate-stock-buybacks-make-earnings-look-better

  9. Jojo commented on Jul 20

    Return to $10-$20 a barrel oil with Iran ready to speed up its pumping?
    ————–
    History Shows Iran Could Surprise the Oil Market
    Most analysts are far too pessimistic about Iran’s ability to bounce back, International Energy Agency Says
    by Javier Blas
    July 19, 2015

    Iran could restore oil production halted by sanctions faster than anyone anticipates if the history of previous shutdowns is any guide.

    The consensus among analysts and traders is that Tehran needs at least a year after sanctions are lifted to raise output to the level prevailing before restrictions were imposed in 2012. Similar pessimistic assessments for supply disruptions at OPEC members Libya and Venezuela were confounded by quicker-than-expected recoveries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

    …

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-19/history-shows-iran-could-be-about-to-surprise-the-oil-market

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