Equity Risk Premium Drill Down Indicates Bizarre Investor Behavior

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 11, 2011 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 4 comments   Earlier this week in my post entitled, “Adjusting the Scale of the Selloff to Demonstrate Its Absurdity,” I spent quite a lot of time talking about this thing called the “equity risk premium” and some of the interesting data I had calculated based on this measure.  Today I wanted to drill down into that equity risk premium data because it indicates some bizarre...
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A New Measure of Real Economic Growth

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 10, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments   I have spent some time with historical economic data over the last several days to try and establish a new measure of real economic growth.  The work, which I will be sharing below, is something that, philosophically, I have been working on for many years. Back in my undergraduate economics education I would hear about gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of a nation’s economic...
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Brief Update About Mood of the Financial Markets

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 9, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments   Today saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average close up 429.92 points, or up 3.98%.  Meanwhile the broader stock index, the S&P 500, closed up 53.07 points, or 4.74%.  Given this surge, let me provide a brief update about the “mood of the market.” While there was clearly a reversal of fortune today, it’s still my feeling that there are many investors that feel queasy;...
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Adjusting the Scale of the Selloff to Demonstrate Its Absurdity

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 9, 2011 in Blog | 4 comments   Yesterday I discussed the absurdity of the stock market sell off in response to the credit downgrade of the United States by Standard & Poor’s.  This prompted an interesting comment from the What My Intuition Tells Me Now blog’s most loyal reader.  Because of the depth of the thinking behind his comment I feel like it deserves a public showing, along with my response.  My...
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U.S. S&P Credit Downgrade

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 8, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments   By now you have heard that ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States to AA+ from its vaunted AAA.  Investors around the world seemed to take this opportunity and this moment to sell, sell, sell their equities.  In fact, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down today 634.76 points, or a 5.55% loss.  Similarly, the Standard &...
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Applauding BNY Mellon’s Move on Excess Cash Balances

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 6, 2011 in Blog | 2 comments   Late Thursday night there was a potentially important development in terms of righting the U.S. economic ship.  Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) moved to charge extra fees on its clients that hold more than $50 million in cash deposits with the bank. Why is this significant?  As I have been tracking on the blog for some time (see last year’s “It’s Chickens That Sit...
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Update on the Financial Market Mood

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Aug 5, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments   I promised yesterday that I would continue to monitor the “mood of the market” until there was some sort of cohesion.  Friday’s close on the Dow Jones was up 60.93 points.  However, the index shot up as many as 170 points, only to then see a decline of 240 points midday before settling at the close of 11,444.61. So what is the mood? Largely relieved, is the answer.  The...
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