Retail sales down for April

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 13, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Hello everyone, Retail sales figures were released today for the month of April and they were down 0.4%. Economists had expected a more modest decline of 0.1%. While the decline was more than expected, it was an improvement over March’s revised decline of 1.3%. We are certainly still in a recession, but as I said last week the pace of decline has massively decelerated and the bottom is...
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Bank pay overhaul?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 13, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments The Presidential Administration of Barack Obama is considering reforming the way financial institutions pay their employees. Primarily they are trying to align pay with long-term performance. It’s about damned time. Power to enforce such measures would come from the Federal Reserve’s supervisory powers or the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). And of course there...
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About the stress tests by the Treasury Secretary

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 7, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Happy Friday everyone! I am heading out to see the new Star Trek movie! Oh yeah! I’ll let you all know how it is…early reviews all love it. For today’s post I wanted to copy yesterday’s op-ed piece by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner. I will quote a paragraph and then provide an explanation of what his words mean so that we can all understand this sort of thing...
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Retail sales mixed for April – recession has bottomed

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 7, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Last month retail sales in the U.S. were down and strongly so, even friggin’ Wal-Mart (ticker: WMT) posted negative same store sales growth and recessions are their bread and butter. “Everyday Low Prices” and all that. So most retailers have reported their April sales by now and have given us yet another sign that the recession has bottomed. Wal-Mart’s same store sales...
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Update from March 12th

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 7, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Back on March 12th of this year I posted a blog entitled, “Bottomed out?” At the time I was reluctant to make a call as to whether or not a bottom had been reached in the equity markets. There was still a lot of uncertainty. However, I was comfortable investing my own money in the midst of that flotsam and jetsam, but reluctant to suggest that my readership do so. My solution was...
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Simply stated…wow!

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 7, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments In yesterday’s post I had said regarding the fact that Bank of America was going to have to raise massive amounts of new equity to improve its risk profile: “It will be interesting to see what the financial market response is to this BAC news. If the financial markets are up then presumably the potential bad news of the stress test capital requirements is already baked into share...
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Big capital infusion needed at BAC

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 6, 2009 in Blog | 2 comments Good morning folks! So the details of the first big stress test of the national banks that I posted about yesterday have been leaked to the public and they regard the U.S.’s biggest bank: Bank of America (ticker: BAC). And wow (!) was the amount of additional capital needed by BAC large…$34 billion! Frankly, I found the number surprising. Why? Well for starters Bank of...
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