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4
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Tumbling Oil Prices May Herald a Bigger Dive to Come |
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Back when the world economy was booming prior to the credit crisis, speculation about how high the price of oil could go was all the rage on Wall Street. As demand surged, investment bank Goldman Sachs famously predicted $200-a-barrel prices, while more provocative commentators saw the price tag reaching $1,000 a barrel.
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4
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Brian Nick: Time To Short Gold |
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Brian Nick, investment strategist, Barclays Wealth (Nick): Now is a good time to short gold, but probably a better time to short gold would have been back in November, when it was $200/oz higher |
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4
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Euro Falling, US Recovery Under Threat |
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Intensified fears over government debt in the eurozone are pushing the euro weaker against the dollar. The G7 achieved nothing over the weekend, the IMF is stuck on the sidelines, and the Europeans are sitting on their hands at least until a summit on Thursday. There is a lot of trading time between now and then – and most of it is likely to be spent weakening the euro further. |
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0
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2009 Closed-end Fund IPO Analysis |
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There were nine IPOs that met the criteria, and in every case the market price performance was worse than the NAV performance. This was partially because of the embedded 5% commission that is built into the IPO price and partially because of the NAV discounts that developed. |
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4
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People’s Bank of China Currency Reserves Biggest Bubble of All Time? |
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The People’s Bank fo China continues to amass huge levels of foreign currency reserves with little attention paid. Those reserves totaled $2.4 trillion as of December 2009, which is larger than the GDP of Italy, the world’s 7th largest economy. China’s reserves are growing at about $400 billion per year, roughly adding Norway’s economy to their reserve surplus every year. |
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3
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Muni Debt Is Bubble Near Bursting, Marketfield’s Aronstein Says |
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Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The $2.8 trillion municipal bond market is a bubble about to burst, as housing and technology did in the past 10 years, said Michael Aronstein, the money manager whose Marketfield Fund returned 31 percent in 2009 by betting correctly on commodity-price swings. |
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1
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End of TALF Means Bond Spreads Fivefold Wider: Credit Markets |
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The expiration of the Fed’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility is driving companies to sell bonds tied to loans that would otherwise require higher yields. Borrowers are offering bonds backed by subprime auto loans, mortgage-servicing payments and assets that have proved hard to sell after the worst credit seizure since the Great Depression. |
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4
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Taleb Says ‘Every Human’ Should Short U.S. Treasuries |
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Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” said “every single human being” should bet U.S. Treasury bonds will decline, citing the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and the Obama administration.
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4
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Who’s Next? Spain? Italy? |
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There’s been a lot of talk over the past few hours about sovereign debt jitters in Europe spreading from Greece to Portugal. |
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1
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Extension of BABs Would Lift Demand |
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A permanent Build America Bonds program, as proposed by the President Obama, is likely to increase interest in these taxable bonds from states and localities among mutual-fund investors. |
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