Free Republic

Global stock markets are on their shakiest footing in years. Investors are fleeing stocks and running to safe-havens like bonds and gold, driven by concerns about economic growth and the effectiveness of central banks' policies. At the same time, tumbling energy prices are upending the economies of oil-producing countries, further slicing into global economic growth. Only six weeks ago cheap oil prices were still expected to cushion the global economy, and the Federal Reserve's decision in December to raise interest rates for the first time since the end of the financial crisis in 2008 was widely seen as a vote...

Amid another battering for stocks Monday, billionaire businessman Donald Trump contended that markets still look overvalued. "I hope I'm wrong, but I think we're in a big, fat, juicy bubble," the Republican presidential candidate said on CNBC's "Power Lunch." Major U.S. stock averages were down more than 2 percent each Monday afternoon, continuing a rocky year in which the S&P 500 has fallen 10 percent. Fears about slowing growth in the United States and around the globe have contributed to the recent selling. Trump, who was in New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday's primary voting, criticized the state of the economy...

I think this is another underlooked aspect of what just happened. I suppose the RINO Governors would have been on stage anyway. I wonder if FIORINO was on the stage if less time would have been allowed for big boy pants and bubble boy to attack eachother?

The global economy seems trapped in a "death spiral" that could lead to further weakness in oil prices, recession and a serious equity bear market, Citi strategists have warned.

Yesterday’s Boston Herald featured this endorsement in the New Hampshire GOP presidential primary. A former U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, [Chris] Christie knows something about being on the front lines of the ongoing war on terror. (SNIP) Not mean-spirited? Not hateful? Tell that to the young woman Christie sandblasted in a New Hampshire town hall meeting Monday night when she asked why he hadn’t stayed in his home state a little longer to help the recovery effort from last weekend’s monster snowstorm.

The stock market currently is even more overvalued than it was at the bull market peaks of both March 2000 and October 2007 -- according to not just one, but two, valuation measures. That at least is the message of an analysis released earlier this week by Ned Davis Research, the quantitative research firm. What caught my eye in the firm's analysis was that, unlike virtually all others that conclude that stocks are overvalued, this one was not based on the so-called Shiller P/E -- the cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio championed by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller of Yale University. That's noteworthy,...

THE curtain at the edge of the universe may be rippling, hinting that there's more backstage. Data from the European Space Agency's Planck telescope could be giving us our first glimpse of another universe, with different physics, bumping up against our own. That's the tentative conclusion of an analysis by Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at Planck's US data centre in California. Armed with Planck's painstaking map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - light lingering from the hot, soupy state of the early universe – Chary revealed an eerie glow that could be due to matter from a neighbouring universe...

(snip) If we thought it was stupid to invest in public internet websites that had no chance of succeeding back then, it’s worse today. In a bubble there is always someone with a “great” idea pitching an investor the dream of a billion dollar payout with a comparison to an existing success story. In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc. Today its, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc. To the investor, its the hope of a huge payout. But there is one critical difference. Back then the companies the general public was investing in were public companies. They may...

On Monday, we got some color on Hillary Clinton’s $350 billion plan to make college more affordable. Students and former students across the country owe more than $1.2 trillion in college loans, and as Bill Ackman so eloquently put it earlier this year, "there’s no way they’re going to pay it back." The fact that America’s student loan bubble is the focus of what may well end up being one of Clinton’s most expensive policy proposals speaks volumes about the urgency of the problem. Of course there are some other folks who understand how quickly the situation is deteriorating. Chief...

The world's most valuable public company saw its stock price drop for a fifth straight day on Tuesday Apple shares are down 14 percent since closing at a record $133 in February That loss breaks down to $113.4billion in paper wealth iPhone sales were not as good as some analysts predicted, and the lukewarm forecast for the current period is causing the drop World's most valuable public company saw its stock price drop for a fifth straight day on Tuesday, falling as much as $5.19 or 4.4 percent, to $113.25 as investors fretted over China's economy and whether Apple can...

People complain about high prices when they’re buying, not when they’re selling, and that’s why housing bubbles are always politically popular: The sort of people who own homes are the sort of people who vote and volunteer on political campaigns and make donations. And the fact that tax revenue tends to increase as housing prices rise doesn’t go unnoticed by the nation’s mayors and governors. Renters tend to have more sensible views — you’ll never hear a renter say, “Hey, my rent is doubling this year — that’s awesome! The economy must be doing great!” But nobody listens to them....

Looking to bargain hunt the recent plunge in Chinese stocks—bid up in an "enormous speculative frenzy" over the past year—would be like "catching a falling knife," former Morgan Stanley Asia Chairman Stephen Roach said Tuesday, just days after returning from a trip to China. Chinese stocks were volatile again overnight, but closed well off session lows, as investors remained doubtful of the efficacy of Beijing's recent market rescue measures. "The bubble is bursting" and predicting the bottom is anyone's guess, Roach told CNBC's "Squawk Box" in an interview. He added, however, that China's efforts to transform its economy remain unchanged....

We already knew the rent was too damn high, even before we published a report this February showing not only that the median for a one bedroom apartment in the city had jumped to $3,460, but that even formerly cheaper neighborhoods were now among the pricey. Apparently though, they weren’t high enough. According to Zillow, the new median rent in San Francisco is $4,225 a month. Zillow’s data compose the “Zillow Rental Index” (ZRI). This index shows rents up 16% year-over-year (YOY) this April, and take into account all types of rentals in San Francisco proper, from single family homes...

The reason why Zero Hedge has been steadfast over the past 6 years in its accusation that the Fed is making a mockery of, and destroying not only the very fabric of capital markets (something which Citigroup now openly admits almost every week) but the US economy itself (as Goldman most recently hinted last week when it lowered its long-term "potential GDP" growth of the US by 0.5% to 1.75%), is simple: all along we knew we have been right, and all the career economists, Wall Street weathermen-cum-strategists, and "straight to CNBC" book-talking pundits were wrong. Not to mention the...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday described stock market valuations as high and said the central bank was carefully monitoring their impact on financial stability. "I would highlight that equity market valuations at this point generally are quite high," Yellen said in conversation with Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, at an economics conference. Coupled with weak economic reports in the morning, her remarks drove stocks broadly lower in Wednesday trading. Yellen added, however, that the overall risks to financial stability are "moderated, not elevated" and she does not see the hallmarks of any bubbles. She...

Best-selling author Harry Dent says the stock bubble we have today is the biggest in history.  Dent contends, “Now we’re in a third bubble, and each of these bubbles peaks at higher highs, and then they each crash to lower lows.” “We’ve been looking for the Dow to peak right around here between 17,000 and 19,000.  So, we are right in the middle.  We are looking for an even bigger correction likely in late 2016 to 2017.  This whole thing has been in an artificial bubble” “We’d be in a depression right now if it were not for $11 trillion...

Kafka & Keynes Mania in financial markets has raged so far out of control as to place them outside the realm of rationality, says former White House budget director David Stockman. “There are no markets left in any meaningful sense of the word, just a raging casino infected with the madness of the crowds and the central bank pied pipers who mesmerize them,” he writes on his blog. That madness is illustrated in the months-long rise of Chinese stocks and the rebound of McDonald’s shares last week, Stockman says. As for China, the Shanghai Composite Index has soared 121...

John Maynard Keynes obit 21 April 1946 Franz Kafka obit 03 June 1924 Here’s an astonishing statistic; more than 30pc of all government debt in the eurozone – around €2 trillion of securities in total – is trading on a negative interest rate. With the advent of European Central Bank quantitative easing, what began four months ago when 10-year Swiss yields turned negative for the first time has snowballed into a veritable avalanche of negative rates across European government bond markets. In the hunt for apparently “safe assets”, investors have thrown caution to the wind, and collectively determined to pay...

American businesses are borrowing at historic high levels, but the only thing growing as a result is how fast their equity capital is vanishing, according to David Stockman, White House budget chief during the Reagan administration. Stockman blamed the Fed and the Fed's Wall Street cheerleaders. He said the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned by nine times since 2000, yet real net investment in the business sector has cratered by 33 percent during the same time period. “Once upon a time businesses borrowed long term money — if they borrowed at all — in order to fund plant, equipment and...