Legislation overhauling regulation of the U.S. financial system, some 18 months in the making, took another step towards becoming a reality on Monday when Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, unveiled a draft bill outlining the framework for new regulatory infrastructure. Several components of the latest bill presented more stringent than had previously been expected, and painted a somewhat frightening picture of a “new normal” for Wall Street executives. [click to continue…]
Agribusiness ETFs got a boost in Friday trading as good news from Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (POT) helped to lift the sector higher as the week came to a close. The Canadian producer of fertilizer and feed significantly raised its earnings guidance range to $1.30 to $1.50 a share, up from an earlier forecast of 70 cents to $1 a share. The average estimate of 23 analysts in a Bloomberg survey was 93 cents. This bullish outlook boosted the hopes of the industry and sent POT soaring higher by nearly 8%. “While we know that growth does not follow a straight upward line, we believe the increase in potash volumes this quarter represents the beginning of a return to long-term growth in demand,” said Potash president and CEO Bill Doyle, suggesting that the worst may finally be behind the fertilizer and agribusiness industry at large. [click to continue…]
France, one of Europe’s largest economies, reported disappointing employment figures this week, calling into question the sustainability of the recovery in one of Europe’s few stable markets. The French job market sharply worsened, as the unemployment rate spiked to 9.9% (9.6% without French overseas dependencies included), the worst level since 1999. In order to rectify [...]
Just weeks after a devastating earthquake sparked a humanitarian crisis in Haiti, another natural disaster has hit the South American nation of Chile. Early Saturday morning, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake, the fifth strongest ever measured in the country, occurred off of Chile’s coast, causing massive destruction throughout the region. At least 100 aftershocks of magnitude [...]
With continued worries over budget crises in the “PIIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) and their rapidly deteriorating fiscal conditions, the future of the euro zone’s common currency has been called into question. Most of attention has focused on Greece, where double digit budget deficits threaten to grind the government to a halt and [...]
With interest rates still hovering just above zero and growing concerns over an unavoidable uptick in inflation, many investors are anticipating that the Federal Reserve will have no choice but to raise rates from their historically low levels in the near future. Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Fed, recently unveiled a strategy to unwind [...]
Markets have been off to a rough start in 2010 with most major benchmarks falling more than 5% year-to-date and sparking fresh fears over a double-dip recession. Relatively few asset classes have gone unscathed as equities, both domestic and international equities have dropped in tandem with commodities. While some see this as a long-overdue downward [...]
Sino-American relations are quickly reaching a breaking point, as the Obama administration continues to spar with the People’s Republic of China over a variety of issues. The first clash was seen in the tariffs proposed on Chinese steel pipe manufacturers last year, followed by another dispute related to tire producers shortly thereafter. The Chinese took [...]
Barack Obama’s first year in office has, by most accounts, been a mixed bag. The massive $787 billion stimulus plan helped to avoid an even deeper recession, but failed to impact joblessness in any meaningful way. Instead of seeing a downturn in the unemployment rate as promised, Americans have seen the rate grow to double [...]
On Monday, news of coordinated bomb attacks in Baghdad made headlines around the world, highlighting the ongoing violence that continues to grip Iraq. Also on Monday, the government reported that the man known as “Chemical Ali,” one of the most ruthless allies of Saddam Hussein, was executed for crimes against humanity. Receiving far less attention [...]
Google, the world leader in online search, has frequently been in the news as of late. With the announcement of their new open source phone, the Nexus One, and their threat to leave China over censorship concerns, it has been a very tumultuous quarter for the search giant. The rocky year continued late Thursday as [...]
When the Obama administration unveiled last week its proposed Financial Crisis Responsibility tax, it appeared that the primary targets would be large banking institutions that had accepted billions of dollars in federal bailout funds last year. But a closer look at the proposal indicates that a handful of large insurance companies, many of whom did [...]
