KUALA LUMPUR: The Employees Provident Fund (EPF) will revise upwards the basic savings quantum of its members to RM196,800 by the age of 55 effective January 1 2014, to ensure enough savings to finance their retirement needs.


The new quantum will be equivalent to RM820 a month for 20 years from age 55 to 75.

The current basic savings amount, which was set in 2008, is RM120,000 at the age of 55.

“The new rates are benchmarked against the minimum pension for public sector employees which are currently at RM820 a month.

So, the monthly retirement income does not fall below the poverty level,” EPF deputy chief executive officer (operations) Datuk Ibrahim Taib told a media briefing here yesterday.


Read more: EPF to raise members’ basic savings level http://www.btimes.com.my/articles/20130822235609/Article/##ixzz2hrDmh7qL

Posted by Mr Thx Wednesday, October 16, 2013 0 comments

Gold has faced stiff headwinds lately as investors abandon alternative investments to chase record-high stock markets.  Probably the most significant has been the major selling hammering the flagship GLD gold ETF.  It has suffered such intense differential selling pressure that its custodians have been forced to dump enormous quantities of physical gold.  What are the implications of this flood of new supply?
The amount of gold bullion GLD has hemorrhaged recently is amazing.  To put it into perspective, earlier this week the rumor that embattled Cyprus may be forced to sell its official gold reserves made news.  The Cypriot government owns 13.9 metric tons of gold.  But on a single trading day alone in February’s gold capitulation, GLD had to sell 20.8 tonnes!  The supply recently added by GLD dwarfs everything else.


Why is GLD dumping gold so aggressively?  While silly conspiracy theories abound as always in the gold world, the reality is far less provocative.  GLD’s mission is simply to track the price of gold.  The World Gold Council (which is funded by leading gold miners) created this gold investment vehicle in November 2004 to offer stock investors an easy, cheap, and efficient way to obtain gold exposure in their portfolios.
The gold miners created a direct conduit for the vast pools of stock-market capital to chase gold.  The only way for GLD to fulfill its mission of tracking gold is for this ETF to shunt excess GLD-share demand and supply into underlying physical gold bullion itself.  This capital sloshing into and out of gold via GLD has naturally had a massive impact on global gold prices.  And lately gold has suffered a major GLD exodus.

During times like 2009 when gold grows popular among investors, GLD shares are bought up far faster than gold itself is rallying.  This excess, or differential, GLD demand would quickly force this ETF to decouple from the metal to the upside if not equalized into physical gold.  So GLD’s custodians sop it up by issuing new GLD shares to meet demand.  They then use the proceeds to buy more gold bullion.
But when gold is falling out of favor like now, capital flows reverse.  GLD shares are dumped at a quicker pace than gold’s own selloff.  This differential selling pressure creates an excess supply of GLD shares.  This ETF would decouple from gold to the downside if this wasn’t equalized into the metal.  So GLD is forced to buy up this excess supply.  It raises the cash to do this by selling some of its gold bullion.

And this is what we’ve experienced lately, heavy differential selling pressure.  As the levitating stock markets rise ever higher, investors have sold gold to buy general stocks.  Because of its incredible liquidity, GLD has been the epicenter of this anti-alternative-investment rotation.  It’s rather illogical when you think about it, selling gold low to buy stocks high.  Investors are supposed to buy low and sell high!

But sadly greed and fear always overwhelm reason at market extremes.  Foolish investors rush to sell low after long corrections, just before new uplegs are born.  And later they eagerly flood into markets after long uplegs, buying high just before major corrections.  Selling low and buying high leads to financial ruin, which is why such a small fraction of investors ever achieve significant success in the financial markets.

Gold is universally despised right now because it is low, the ideal time to buy.  General stocks are adored if not worshipped because they are high, the prudent time to sell.  Every day on CNBC, a long parade of analysts effectively proclaim gold is doomed to sink to zero while stocks will joyously rally forever more.  The intense selling pressure GLD has faced in recent months simply reflects these emotional extremes.
As a contrarian I’ve grown rich fighting the crowd, being brave when others are afraid and afraid when others are brave as Warren Buffett once eloquently put it.  That’s the only way to buy low and sell high.  So I’ve watched GLD’s holdings lately with great interest.  Thankfully this flagship gold ETF is very transparent, publishing its holdings daily.  How does GLD’s holdings plunge stack up relative to precedent?

This first chart over the past year or so highlights the extreme differential selling pressure GLD has faced in recent months.  Its holdings are shown in blue and tied to the right axis, superimposed over the gold price in red.  There has been no bigger headwind facing gold lately than the deluge of physical-gold-bullion supply GLD has been forced to dump into the global gold markets.  It has proven overwhelming.





Remember Cyprus’s 13.9t of official gold reserves?  The recent “correction” in GLD’s holdings has forced it to dump a staggering 169.8t of gold bullion simply to keep GLD shares’ price tracking gold!  We are talking about 5.5m ounces of gold here, from this single American ETF!  There are only two gold-mining companies in the entire world (Barrick and Newmont) that produce that much gold in a whole year!

Yet the mass exodus from GLD by stock investors forced it to add 169.8t of gold supply in just over 4 months.  It’s hard to believe given how despised gold is today, but back on December 7th GLD’s holdings hit an all-time record high of 1353.4t.  They remained stable and held near this record for several weeks, until two simultaneous events hit in early January that started cracking gold’s bullish sentiment.

First the flagship S&P 500 stock index soared 2.5% on January’s opening trading day on news of the fiscal-cliff tax deal.  The biggest tax hike in US history had been narrowly averted at the very last minute.  And then the very next day, the minutes from the recent FOMC meeting were misinterpreted to imply the Fed was already preparing to shut off its brand-new QE3 debt-monetization campaign.  So gold sold off.
Ever since 2013’s fateful initial trading days, those psychological cracks plaguing gold have spread.  Every day that the stock markets’ levitation continued, gold fell farther out of favor among investors.  And then every few weeks there was either an FOMC meeting or the minutes from one to spook traders into somehow assuming the Fed’s unprecedented open-ended inflation campaign would end prematurely.

The resulting heavy differential selling pressure on GLD shares is readily apparent above.  This peaked in late February just after gold selling cascaded into a full-blown capitulation.  In just 7 trading days late that month, GLD’s custodians were forced to sell 5.0% of its holdings (65.5t) to buy back enough excess share supply to keep this ETF from decoupling from gold.  Like many market extremes, this became self-feeding.
As GLD dumped bullion to raise enough cash to buy back the flood of excess shares being sold, those very gold sales weighed on global gold prices.  This caused more gold stops to be triggered, and kindled more fear, scaring still more traders into exiting.  The lower gold went, the more people sold, and the more this selling forced GLD to add big supplies to a very weak gold market.  It was a relentless vicious circle.

As of this past Wednesday, GLD’s holdings had fallen a mind-boggling 12.5% in just over 4 months!  It has had to liquidate 1/8th of its total gold bullion to keep up with stock traders rushing for the gold exits.  Over this same span, the gold price is down 8.6%.  Since rising and falling GLD holdings reveal whether stock traders are buying or selling gold on balance, I’ve closely followed them daily since GLD’s birth.

GLD holdings trends are one of the best gold sentiment indicators available.  And provocatively they’ve long proven rather “sticky”.  While stock traders eagerly buy up GLD shares when gold is rallying and in favor, they have generally not sold too aggressively when gold was correcting.  So the sheer degree of the recent GLD holdings plunge sure felt exceptional.  I’ve been wondering if it was the biggest ever.

So this week I decided to look at all the GLD holdings “corrections” over this ETF’s entire history.  And I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we’ve weathered worse.  Coming off record highs, the recent 169.8t GLD dump is certainly the biggest absolute decline in its holdings.  But in percentage terms, GLD’s holdings suffered even bigger retreats as gold fell deeply out of favor during 2008’s crazy stock panic.



My suspicion that the recent GLD holdings plunge was exceptional was generally correct.  Outside of that once-in-a-century stock panic, GLD’s average holdings correction has merely been 5.9% over 3.9 months.  So while the recent holdings correction’s 4.0-month duration is on par, its 12.5% slide more than doubled what has been typically witnessed for the vast majority of GLD’s lifespan.  It was indeed very big.
The only comparable declines were leading into and during 2008’s stock panic, when GLD’s holdings plunged 12.6% over 1.4 months and later another 13.0% over 2.0 months.  It is interesting that these were the worst GLD selloffs ever seen, and they happened in far-worse gold conditions.
While gold is merely down 8.6% during the recent GLD holdings correction, it plunged by 13.3% and 22.0% during 2008’s!

The latter is particularly interesting and relevant today.  If there was ever a time for gold to shine as a safe haven, it was during that epic stock panic.  In a single month in October 2008, the flagship S&P 500 stock index plummeted 30.0%!  Fear was off the charts, with the definitive VXO fear gauge challenging 90 when only around 50 is normally the worst-case extreme.  The financial world was crumbling right before our eyes.
Yet gold couldn’t catch a bid!  Its price plunged 16.7% over that month-long span where the stock markets lost nearly a third of their value.  Stock investors deployed in GLD rushed to sell their shares, both disgusted by gold’s failure to surge on a financial Apocalypse and trying to raise cash wherever they could.  Between July and November 2008, gold fell an astounding 27.2%.  It was truly a total disaster.

The main reason gold plummeted during that panic is because safe-haven buying flooded into the US dollar instead, driving its biggest and fastest rally (22.6% higher in 4 months) ever witnessed.  But the key takeaway today is that the financial world was totally convinced gold was dead.  If it couldn’t rally in that panic, then it was no longer a safe haven.  There was no reason to own gold anymore, its bull was over.
Sound familiar?  That’s the exact kind of thing we’ve been hearing in recent weeks.  Because gold hasn’t rallied despite the Cyprus bank failures and record Fed debt monetizations, there must be something fundamentally wrong with this metal.  Traders are abandoning it in droves, just like they did in late 2008.

But obviously they were dead wrong to sell low then when gold was hated.  It was on the cusp of soaring.
Right as investors totally capitulated and gave up on gold in November 2008, it was carving a major bottom.  It would ultimately power from around $700 then to $1900 by August 2011.  And ever since it has consolidated high, it is simply at the low end of its multi-year trading range today.  A major gold correction driving or being driven by a massive 1/8th GLD holdings selloff was the best buy signal of gold’s bull!
I suspect the recent 1/8th GLD holdings correction will prove similarly bullish.  In order for stock traders to dump GLD shares rapidly enough to force it to sell so much bullion so fast, their sentiment has to be hyper-bearish.  They have to be utterly convinced gold’s bull is dead to sell so aggressively.

But whenever sentiment swings to such unsustainable extremes, major bottoms are carved leading into major uplegs.Extreme GLD selling on a daily basis is also a fantastic contrarian indicator itself.  I generally consider GLD differential selling pressure on any given day material if it is big enough to force GLD’s holdings down by more than 0.5% that day alone.  And big GLD holdings liquidation days are over 1.0%.  Clusters of these near gold lows are major bottoming indicators, they reveal sentiment in gold has grown too bearish to persist.
Since the February gold capitulation, we’ve seen 3 separate trading days where GLD’s holdings fell more than 1.0%.  They are pretty rare over GLD’s 8.4-year history, only occurring 51 times or about once every 40 trading days.  The last time a similar cluster was seen was actually in October 2008 during the stock panic, just before gold started more than doubling in its next mighty upleg that was being born in despair.

So historically big GLD liquidations, both in individual-trading-day and multi-month-trend terms, have actually been very bullish contrarian indicators.  This precedent completely contradicts many of the gold bears dominating the financial media, who claim excessive GLD selling is bearish rather than bullish.  In reality, stock traders panicking out of GLD shares is an indicator of fear reaching irrational extremes.
So smart contrarians fight the crowd and aggressively buy GLD holdings plunges.  The only way to buy low is to be brave when others are afraid, and they are certainly afraid of gold today.  Bearishness in this yellow metal has recently hit extremes not seen since the stock panic, the best gold buying opportunity of its secular bull.  The recent GLD holdings liquidation was also panic-magnitude, utterly unsustainable.

Stock investors have been fleeing GLD, selling low, so they can plow their capital into general stocks near nominal record highs.  The red-hot stock markets have fueled the dismal sentiment in alternative investments like gold.  But as soon as they decisively turn, which ought to be imminent given how overbought and euphoric the stock markets are today, the precious metals will start returning to favor.
The same unsustainable hyper-bearish sentiment forcing the massive GLD liquidation in recent months is crushing the gold miners’ stocks.  They are hyper-oversold, trading at their lowest valuations of their entire secular bull.  The main gold-stock index is scraping fundamentally-absurd 45-month lows, trading as if gold and silver were 41% and 53% lower than today’s levels!  The gold-stock sector is loathed today.

Which makes it an extraordinary contrarian buying opportunity!  At Zeal we’ve been concentrating our buying around this major gold bottom in smaller dirt-cheap gold and silver miners with dazzling fundamentals.  As sentiment inevitably turns in gold, the entire precious-metals realm is going to soar but the best of the miners ought to skyrocket.  We are talking about stock prices tripling or quadrupling!
So if you have cultivated the mental toughness to buy low when few others dare, gold stocks are the place to be today.  We are constantly researching that entire universe to uncover the most fundamentally-promising miners.  Last month we published a popular new 31-page fundamental report profiling our dozen favorite junior gold producers in depth.  Buy it today, buy some great gold stocks cheap, and thank us later!

We also publish acclaimed weekly and monthly subscription newsletters long loved by speculators and investors worldwide.  In them I draw on our vast experience, wisdom, knowledge, and ongoing research to explain what is going on in the markets, why, where they are likely headed, and how to trade them.  Our contrarian approach works, the 637 stock trades recommended in our newsletters since 2001 have averaged stellar annualized realized gains of +33.9%!  Subscribe today!

The bottom line is stock investors have indeed been panicking out of GLD in recent months.  This extreme bearishness has created a panic-grade drawdown in GLD’s holdings.  All this excess gold supply from GLD’s forced selling has been a major headwind for gold, exacerbating its latest correction.  But historically extreme GLD selling by stock traders is a major bottoming indicator for the yellow metal.

Like everything else in the markets, gold bottoms and embarks on major new uplegs when everyone is convinced it is dead.  Widespread fear soon leads to selling exhaustion, leaving only buyers.  So gold soon starts rallying again, gaining momentum.  This coming upleg has the potential to be very large as the euphoric, overbought, levitating stock markets inevitably reverse.  Alternatives will quickly regain favor.
Adam Hamilton, CPA

Source

Posted by Mr Thx Saturday, April 13, 2013 0 comments


We’ve now have just a little over 30 days until US breaches its debt ceiling.
We would have already done so, except Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner borrowed some $200 billion from emergency funds to buy a few weeks’ time (announcing that he’d be leaving his post before the actual ceiling was breached).

The “solutions” to the debt ceiling discussions range from outright insane ($1 trillion coins) to just staggeringly irresponsible (just get rid of any oversight and grow the debt without restriction).
Let us consider the facts.

The only reason the US is even having these discussions is because we’ve added $1+ trillion in debt to our balance sheet every year since 2008. The reason we were able to get away with this was because Congress hasn’t even implemented a budget since that time. Indeed, the last time a budget was even proposed (by President Obama in that case) it was rejected 97-0.

Let’s say a US family spent all of its savings and income and so began using credit cards to fund its purchases. Then, instead of implementing reforms and a budget, these folks decide to abandon any kind of tracking of their expenses and start spending even more. Eventually this family would begin to stop paying its bills.

What would you tell these folks if their proposed solution to this situation was to stop opening their mail?
At the core of this entire situation is a total lack of financial discipline. Indeed, at this point, the only thing the political class in the developed world seems to pay attention to is the bond markets: only when their bonds collapse and interest rates spike is there any sense of urgency to do anything (with massive debt loads, any increase in interest rates means hundreds of billions of dollars in more interest expenses).
On that note, the US 30-year Treasury appears to just have taken out its trendline:



Bear in mind, the US Federal Reserve has been the primary buyer of US debt. So if the US bond market begins to collapse at a time when the Fed is already buying this much, there isn’t a whole lot the Fed can do to fix the situation (other than just buy more… which inevitably leads to a debt implosion).
This situation has the potential to get very ugly. Remember the impact the failed debt ceiling talks had on the markets in July 2011?



At that time, the only thing that pulled the market back from the edge was the Fed’s announcement of QE 2. But the Fed has already just announced both QE 3 and QE 4. So this option wont be around to fix the fallout if the US breaches its debt ceiling again now.

Source HERE

Posted by Mr Thx Thursday, January 10, 2013 0 comments

With 2013 now under way, the Godfather of newsletter writers, Richard Russell, told his subscribers that after being in the business for 60 years, he has never seen anything like this (described below).  Russell also discussed the massive silver short position and gold’s eternal value.  Here is what Russell had to say: “Bull market or bear market?  Below we see a listing of the year-end cost of gold denominated in Federal Reserve Notes (these notes are now commonly called “dollars”).  From a market standpoint, we're looking at one of the greatest bull markets in history.  But ironically, referring to “dollars alone,” this is one of the worst bear markets I've ever seen.
 
Richard Russell continues:

“Bear market?  Sure, back in the year 2000, for only 273 dollars you could buy one ounce of gold.  But by 2012, you needed over 1600 dollars to buy the same one ounce of gold.  The eternal value of gold doesn't change.  It's the purchasing power of the Federal reserve note that has changed.


The price of gold in terms of “dollars” has now risen thirteen years in succession.  But what is even more remarkable is the fact that most Americans have totally ignored (even despised) this remarkable bull market.  Let a stock rise seven or eight years in a row, and it will be the talk of Wall Street and the talk of every social gathering in the nation.


Yet this amazing bull market in gold stands alone, sneered at and almost hated.  I've been in this business for over 60 years, and I've never seen anything quite like it.  However, I do think I know something about human nature.  What I've learned about human nature is that it doesn't change.  For instance, if a stock creeps up year after year, sooner or later the crowd will discover it -- and then they'll pounce on it, ultimately sending that undiscovered stock far above its reasonable price.


My belief is that somewhere ahead, the crowd will latch on to gold.  Then, as disinterested in gold as they are now, the crowd will pile into gold with the same frenzy that overtook the storied “49ers” when they packed their bags, kissed their wives and kids good bye, and headed West in search of gold.


Gold is the only item that elicits both greed and fear.  The greed factor is so well known that I don't have to explain it here.  But the fear factor only arises when men (and women) see the “value” of their money disappearing.  Nothing concentrates the mind as dramatically as seeing the purchasing power of one's hard-earned income and savings being ruthlessly destroyed.


As I write, Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve is systematically shaving off the purchasing power of the dollar in the same way that you can peel the layers off an onion.  The US has been in the process of constructing the greatest credit bubble in history.  The world has never seen anything like it.


This enormous bubble is now being attacked by the worldwide forces of deflation.  Fed Chairman Bernanke is terrified by the mere thought of deflation.  Bernanke will not stand for deflation.  He has said as much.  And he will attack deflation and crumbling asset prices with all the inflationary power at his command.


As the ocean of new dollars pours out of the computers of the Federal Reserve, the purchasing power of the dollar erodes.  It erodes slowly at first, but as the river of dollars turn into an ocean, slowly-rising inflation segues into a monster.  Finally, the crowd recognizes what is happening to their money.


The loaf of bread that cost a dollar last year suddenly costs four dollars.  The cup of coffee that cost a dollar last week goes on special today for two fifty.  The college tuition that cost four thousand dollars now costs sixteen thousand and there's the extra for a dorm. You're suddenly paralyzed.  A light bulb in your head starts to glow.  And just as suddenly, the mad, frantic rush for gold is on.


Old timers shake their heads knowingly and repeat the old saw, “There's no fever like gold fever!”  And the rush for the yellow metal turns into a full frenzy.  Even as I write, the subtle but tell-tale signs of “gold-fever” are seen and heard.  New gold funds and new gold ETFs are started.


Full-page advertisements appear in the newspapers, drawing attention to the loss of purchasing power in the dollar, and lauding the advantages of owning gold and silver.  Gold vending machines appear at airports and in European and Asian department stores.  Pressure is rising to force lawmakers to elect gold as legal tender.


On March 29, 2011, the state of Utah passed a law stating that gold and silver will be legal tender in the state of Utah.  Imagine, just imagine -- gold being treated as real money!  That alone shows us how far and how completely insane the nation's attitude towards gold and silver has become.  Gold has been treated as money for 3,000 years.  “As good as gold” is a well-known expression.  Yet, today in the US, gold is not considered to be legal tender.


No fiat money has lasted for as long as a century.  The US has had prior experience with fiat money -- the Civil War Greenbacks, the “Bills of Credit” of the original American colonies, the ill-fated Continentals during the Civil War.  None of these have survived, and neither will the Federal Reserve notes that we now refer to as “dollars.”


I dislike falling back on the morality argument, but consider this.  I may work a lifetime for five million dollars.  Yet some academic working for the Federal Reserve can press some keys on a computer and create ten billion dollars instantly without working up a sweat.  Is the ten billion dollars he creates moral money?  Did anyone work for the money?  Did anyone take a risk for the money?  Did anyone drop a bead of sweat for it?  No, then I claim it is immoral and actually evil money, and as such it is doomed.


The only power evil has is the power to destroy itself.  I affirm that the Federal Reserve note is doomed.  When the Federal Reserve note goes down the drain, all fiat money in the world will go down with it.  Today information travels around the world with the speed of NOW.  People around the planet will see that fiat money is a fantasy and a counterfeit fraud foisted upon them by unconscionable and unscrupulous bankers.  It is then that the crowd will turn to gold, in much the way that people turned to gold back in 1978 to 1980.


Now this may be “far out.”  I'm reading a lot about silver and its huge short position.  I hear that the silver shorts are bigger than the amount of physical silver that is readily available.  The silver mining stocks have already surged.  And I wonder if silver starts to boom, whether that action wouldn't rub off on gold?  Hmmm, it's a thought.”

source here

Posted by Mr Thx Tuesday, January 8, 2013 0 comments

It is ironic that stocks are at five years highs going into what is probably going to be the biggest disappointment of an earning`s season since the 2008 financial crisis. We got a hint of 4th quarter results during the disaster which was the 3rd quarter earning`s season where most companies missed on the revenue side, and those that beat EPS guidance, did so barely, and most of that was created through stock buybacks and creative smoothing techniques.


Make no mistake when a public company sets earning`s guidance these are numbers that are very conservative, and they expect to blow these numbers away given a healthy business environment. When a company just barely hits or beats the EPS number, and misses on revenue you know they were buying back stock, and trying any possible financial trick to attain the EPS number. One of the oldest tricks on Wall street, besides giving easy guidance so that when it comes time for earning`s the stock shoots up because they “beat” expectations.

The fact that companies have to struggle so much just to meet expectations tells how bad things are from a corporate profit standpoint. They have cut their operations to the bone for the last three years, and built earnings up from the bottom, and that strategy has reached its point of exhaustion. No more to be squeezed out of that cost cutting strategy.

The Fiscal Cliff 

Moreover, with the continual uncertainty coming out of Washington from a policy perspective, code word the Fiscal Cliff, it`s unlikely that CEO`s committed much towards year end discretionary CAP EX purchases which would spur corporate growth during the fourth quarter. So expect to hear the term Fiscal Cliff during Earning`s season quite a lot as the primary excuse for business headwinds by the executive teams during conference calls.

Deja Vu

Last quarter stocks were at these same levels, and companies started missing and no one wanted to sell hoping that they would get better earning`s reports, but firms just kept missing, and getting taken down one by one while the market stayed afloat at elevated levels.
Then more and more firms were missing on the same days, the big boys started missing, and finally the shorts were going to take multiple firms stocks down on the same day, and Wall Street pumpers threw in the proverbial towel on an options expiration Friday of all days, and took prices down to the next level in most stocks.

In other words, they tried to ignore the bad earnings and keep the rally alive, but the shorts are going to punish bad earning`s regardless of bullish sentiment.

Expect the same pattern of behavior as most fund managers are sheep and too stupid to actually get out before earnings season starts, and buy after the inevitable selloff. They wait and hope and once one big player unloads they all run for the exits at the same time leaving quite a carnage in stocks along the way. One benefit is that short sellers can get some very cheap puts and establish some very attractive entry points for the inevitable ride back below 1400 in the S&P 500.

The Debt Fight

Moreover, with the upcoming fight over increasing the debt limit just around the corner expect quite a sizable selloff in markets which sends everybody back into the comforts of bonds teasing bond vigilantes once again, and reminding everyone including the fed that we really are still in a deflationary, deleveraging cycle that will not turn until true growth based upon sound financial principles are in place in Washington.
Washington is the biggest reason this economy has taken so long to recover from the financial crisis in 2008. And their ineptitude has caused the fed to overcompensate with an unprecedented and borderline extreme monetary solution which remains to be seen what the eventual unintended consequences are of said policy.
As this is new territory for the fed, and a grand experiment which economists will be analyzing for the next 50 years of academic study as to the ultimate costs & benefits to our society.

Cost cutting versus top-line growth

Corporations have had to watch costs the last three years, work their employees longer hours, control costs from an operational standpoint, i.e., operate more efficiency and take advantage of low financing and borrowing costs to manufacture earnings where they can through stock buybacks and creative use of capital.
But the one thing that hasn`t been present for corporations is an environment where the economy is robust and we are adding 500,000 jobs a month to the economy, and they can afford to hire and grow profits from the top line through new growth opportunities.

Expect to see the 4th quarter earning`s season reflective of squeezing all that can be had from the bottom line over the last three years, and the lack of true growth opportunities, which showed its ugly head during the 3rd quarter earnings results, make a pronounced appearance this earning`s season.

Fund Managers are slow learners

Stocks will get hit hard as shorts take down the earning`s misses one by one, until the fund managers get the hint, and start selling before the shorts eat into their profits, and start dumping everything mid-way through this earning`s season.

The excuses will be prevalent, all pointing to a lack of certainty out of Washington, but the real reason is that you can only cut your way to profits for so long before you need actual real growth in the economy, and apart from the slight uptick from the bottom in the housing market, the rest of the economy is just not robust enough to produce earning`s growth that is reflective of top line opportunities.
By EconMatters


source here

Posted by Mr Thx Monday, January 7, 2013 0 comments
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