EU economic stats are getting grim

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 20, 2009 in Blog | 1 comment Hello everyone! In addition to tracking the U.S. economy and its travails, I have been closely following the other major economies around the world. In general, the story is not good. Rather than summarize an extant story I am just going to quote a story by the good folks at Stratfor. Stratfor is short for Strategic Forecasting and they provide spectacular analysis of geopolitics. Their economic...
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What is wrong with these people?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 20, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article about the widespread practice of businesses privately taking out life insurance policies on their employees with themselves as the beneficiaries. Chances are if you work for a big corporation and are at least a mid-level manager that there is a life insurance policy on you, too. If you die, the company takes the payout from the policy. While...
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Primus mortgage regulatorus

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 20, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments In yet another sign that the Obama Administration “gets it” they have announced plans to give a single regulatory agency the authority to oversee mortgages and other consumer-oriented financial products. Hurray! Another option would be the creation of a new regulator. Believe it or not, but there is no single regulator for these products (egads!). There is some discussion of...
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Rally ballyhoo

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 19, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments So I am guessing that most of you saw that the Dow Jones, and other stock markets, were up big time on Monday, yes? It was certainly a welcome reprieve, especially since the news that had driven the stock markets down so much over the previous many trading sessions was a little thin. In other words, the sell off had more to do with people locking in their gains than any really substantive,...
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Regulatory update

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 14, 2009 in Blog | 2 comments By now it’s a dead horse – but hey, let’s beat it some more. I repeat myself here to help concepts take root in my beloved readership and also because I recognize that the blog is picking up new readers frequently who may not be up to speed with everything that we have discussed. DEAD HORSE: For the economy to fully recover the institutions that led us here and that failed must...
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Jobless data

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 14, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Today unemployment figures for the previous were released and they were worse than expected with an increase in those seeking unemployment benefits of ~32,000. While not a positive number, I have to emphasize that 32,000 newly unemployed over a U.S. population of approximately 305 million is nothing and is an increase equal to one-thousandth of one percent. Not surprisingly, investors today...
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It’s not panic time

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 14, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Good morning everyone! Most likely you have seen that the stock markets have been down and sharply over the last few sessions, yes? So is it panic time? I believe not. Many investors, myself included, looked at the massive run up in share prices over the prior many weeks as Herculean. It was the second best performance of the stock market for a period of that length in history! One model of the...
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