Germany continues to producer a fiscal surplus
This was never in doubt.
Here’s the report from Fitch.
Archives of “Microeconomics” tag
rssUnanswered phase one deal question is what imports China commits to (and the caveats)
Will there be a hard target? What about pricing?
Reuters today reports that China has pledged to buy nearly an additional $80 billion in manufactured goods from the US over the next two years plus $50B more in energy supplies. The deal also calls for Chinese purchases of agricultural goods to increase $32B over two years and imports of US services by about $35 billion.
However some of the details may be kept secret and instead we would get targets for four broad areas: energy, manufacturing, services and agriculture with a total near $200B above the 2017 baseline.
From the Chinese side they risk running afoul of WTO rules and the multilateral system they’re trying to uphold. However that could be mitigated by provisions in the deal that say the US will have to provide the goods at competitive prices.
Global Times editor (and party mouthpiece) Hu Xijin appeared to confirm the deal with that caveat:
As far as I know, China did make a commitment to expand imports from the US. China has a huge market which is growing quickly. It will be more of a test for the US whether it can provide enough products that Chinese market welcomes and are competitive in price.
China September activity data: Industrial Production 5.8% y/y (expected 4.9%)
IP, retail sales and investment data
Industrial Production 5.8% y/y big beat
- expected 4.9%, prior was 4.4%
industrial production YTD 5.6% y/y
- expected 5.5%, prior was 5.6%
Fixed Assets (excluding rural) YTD 5.4% y/y small miss
- expected 5.5%, prior was 5.5%
Retail Sales 7.8% y/y inline
- expected 7.8%, prior was 7.5%
Retail Sales YTD 8.2% y/y
- expected 8.1%, prior was 8.2%
10 Trading Wisdom points
(1) Any strategy you build will be determined by your beliefs about the market and the objectives you’re trying to achieve. Therefore, your beliefs and objectives are the starting point of the system design and build process and it’s from these you will determine your Key Idea.
(2) Therefore, your Key Idea is your working hypothesis or your explanation of what the foundations of your system are and how it will work.
(3) One of the most famous Key Idea’s was declared by the Turtle Traders, specifically Richard Dennis. Being trend traders they acknowledged that every trend, without fail, was preceded by a breakout.
(4) From that start point they used a standard channel breakout to enter and they also had what they called a ‘fail safe’ breakout entry which absolutely guaranteed they’d capture every new trend.
(5) The Key Idea of Warren Buffett is that you should buy a great company at a cheap price. From this Key Idea he built specific rules and guidelines about how to actually go about doing that.
(6) The Beliefs of many of the worlds great traders can be found in various texts, such as the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager. Examples: – Markets only trends 30% of the time – The big money is made in the big trends – Buying value is a safe strategy – Stops get hunted
(7) Your objectives are also very important in the design process. In many instances I often hear, “I want to make as much money as possible”. Well, we all do, but that’s a very one dimensional view of the world and of the process of designing a trading system.
(8) Indeed, there is much research to suggest extremely successful traders view profits as a by-product and not the main goal. Many successful traders are passionate about the markets and it’s that passion, not the want of profits, that enable them to succeed.
(9) Taking a more holistic view, objectives encompass many other dimensions, such as your personal risk tolerance and your lifestyle factors. If you’re a family man & has system that requires you to sit in front of a screen for 15-hours a day, it’s probably not a realistic goal.
(10) So your objectives must be broader than just profitability. They must be aligned with your Beliefs. They must be aligned with realistic expectations and they must be aligned with your lifestyle.
Markets Will Be Markets
The stock market is bipolar creature, driven by sentiment and irrational expectations. One day, it is an ingenious forward-looking mechanism that anticipates and discounts future events beautifully. Another day, it is a stubborn schizophrenic that can’t see further than its nose.
Markets constantly overreact to both, identified risks and opportunities. It is in the nature of financial markets to exaggerate, to magnify. This is why they are not always discounting the future. Sometimes, they are correcting previously incorrect view. Sometimes, they just go bonkers and send prices to levels that cannot possibly be justified by any future scenario. Boys will be boys. Markets will be markets. They’ll fluctuate violently, up and down and to levels that will seem incomprehensible to many. Indexing, robo-advising and social media won’t change that. The Internet might have made people smarter; but it hasn’t made financial markets more efficient. You could complain and whine about financial markets’ irrationality or you could find a way to take advantage of it. Or don’t. It’s your choice.
If you understand people’s incentives, you are very likely to predict correctly their future behavior and sometimes even influence it. Most incentives have expiration date. What is important today, might not be as important tomorrow. This applies perfectly to life, but not always in financial markets that live in their own world. Incentives require the existence of rationality. We have already made the point that more often than not, markets are not rational, but emotional, at least in a short-term perspective. As Howard Marks eloquently puts it: (more…)
40+40+5 Super Wealthy People Have More Money Than The Poorest 3.5 Billion Combined
The global economy is structured to systematically funnel wealth to the very top of the pyramid, and this centralization of global wealth is accelerating with each passing year. According to the United Nations, 85 super wealthy people have more money than the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet combined. And 1.2 billion of those poor people live on less than $1.25 a day. There is something deeply, deeply broken about a system that produces these kinds of results. Seven out of every ten people on the planet live in countries where the gap between the wealthy and the poor has increased in the last 30 years. Despite our technological advances, somewhere around a billion people go to bed hungry every single night. And when our fundamentally flawed financial system finally does collapse, it will be the poor that will suffer the worst.
Now, let me make one thing clear at the outset.
Big government and more socialism are not the answer to anything. Big government and more socialism almost always result in increased oppression and increased poverty. If you want to see where that road ultimately leads to, just look at North Korea.
What we need is a system that empowers individuals and families to work hard, be creative, build businesses and to take care of themselves.
But instead, we have a system where all power and all wealth are increasingly controlled by giant banks and giant corporations that are in turn controlled by the global elite. The “financialization” of the global economy has turned almost everyone on the planet into “deft serfs”, and the compound interest on all of that debt enables the global elite to constantly increase their giant piles of money.
As I have written about previously, the total amount of government debt in the world has increased by about 40 percent since the last recession. (more…)
A modern French Karl Marx Jr
Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century named to seem similar to Das Kapital supposedly proves that capital is bad for everyone, and some people owning a lot of it is REALLY bad.
The solution? Tax the heck out of their wealth, and globally because destroying wealth will create more of it. All data-driven, because in France economists are not respected and need to prove their case. Since Marx Sr. had such a pleasant impact, who knows what this book destined to be “something big” and much appreciated in a thorough Harvard Business Review review will bring?
Big wins & small losses make all the difference in profitability versus long term losing
