Where were you the day the market dropped nearly 700 points in 20 minutes? Don’t remember. You’re not alone.
May 6th was the one-year anniversary of the so-called Flash Crash. It came and went without much fanfare. But on the day of the event a year ago and for a few months after, it seemed like a really big deal – clear sign the US …
Wall Street and Washington haven’t been getting along for a while. So perhaps it isn’t a surprise that the stock market seems somewhere between indifferent and gleeful at the prospect of a possible government shutdown. Stocks are up today, even as the likelihood of a government shutdown seems to have climbed from no-way to …
Happy Piggy (Getty Images)
There is a lot of debate about whether prices are rising or not. And over whether we have too much inflation or not enough. But there is the price of one thing that surely seems to be hit with hyperinflation recently: The price of being happy.
Last September, a study came out that said the amount of income …
It’s more than just what on the floor (Photo: Mike Segar/REUTERS)
For the second day in the row, the US stock market plunged, and then bounced back. Hurt, yes, but shares were not beaten, even as investors had to worry about the double whammy of concerns of nuclear contamination in Japan and a housing report that showed new home …
Bill Gross says sell (Photo: Jason Reed/Reuters)
US debt may no longer be a good investment, at least for now. And that might be the good news.
Famed investor Bill Gross, who runs the PIMCO Total Return Fund, recently sold all of the US Treasury bonds is his fund’s portfolio. It’s a huge move for the manager of the world’s largest …
Here’s another data point that gold and other things that are supposed to trade up when inflation spikes are in a bubble: The prices of books about hyperinflation are themselves hyperinflated (from Fortune):
Jens O. Parsson’s out of print economic treatise, Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations, is selling
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Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research Center has a study out this month about the cost of 401(k) plans, and they have found another flaw in the nation’s defacto retirement savings system: It is overpriced. So not only do 401(k) plans not meet the needs of the average American, they aren’t cost effective either. I wrote about …
It’s a long held mantra on Wall Street to buy straw hats in winter. The notion is that you should buy the shares of a company when no body wants them, or when things look their worst. Buy at the low. So based on that logic here’s the question: Is BP’s stock a buy? That’s the case that Felix Salmon makes on his Reuters blog:
Did the
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The Standard & Poors 500 vs. The CBOE Volatility Index
Volatility Mad Dow disease is back, baby. The Dow Jones industrial average started the day with a bang, down 300 points. It then rose most of the day. The result: The Dow was down just 20 points by the end of the day. The Standard & Poors 500 was actually up slightly. What’s going …
I usually ignore stories trying to predict stock market drops. Who really knows? Not me. But with stocks down more than 250 points today, Fortune’s article earlier this week by veteran writer Shawn Tully is looking very prescient:
Here’s how I see the odds. The chances are about one in three that we suffer a huge, wrenching correction in
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The consumer price index, which measures inflation, was out this morning and it was down slightly in April. Here’s what Calculated Risk had to say:
The disinflationary trend continues – and with all the slack in the system (especially the 9.9% unemployment rate), it is hard to see inflation picking up any time soon. The high unemployment
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Warren Buffett is old. He can’t keep up with the times. He’s famously cheap, and wears dorky grandpa glasses and bad suits. Even his seemingly cool nickname, “The Oracle of Omaha,” sort of sounds like a hokey phrase coined in the Roaring ’20s, or perhaps in ancient Greece. But as he’s proved time and again—like last year, when net …