Merrill Lynch and Citi bearish on gold prices and equities as US monetary policy normalisation approaches September 27, 2013 Gold will fall by 18 per cent to $1,291/oz in real terms in 2015, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. That's a downgrade to their outlook for gold prices, and is based on the view that while US fiscal squabbles will stabilise prices, the focus of investors will still be the "gradual normalisaiton of [...]
Italian business confidence stronger in September September 27, 2013 Italian business confidence beating estimates in September, up from 93.4 (revised from 92.9) to 96.6. That's a nice upwards revision to the previous period, and September's figure beats economists forecasts of a rise to 93.4. Statisticians Istat said that the index in construction rose to 78.6 from 76.4, and that market services confidence was up [...]
Pound moves above $1.61 as Carney says no case for more QE September 27, 2013 Bank of England governor Mark Carney has said there's no case for more quantitative easing, in an interview with the Yorkshire Post today. But my personal view is, given the recovery has strengthened and broadened, I don’t see a case for quantitative easing and I have not supported it. (Yorkshire Post) That's provided support for [...]
Lloyds to be best capitalised bank in the UK says JP Morgan September 27, 2013 Lloyds is to be the best capitalized bank in the UK by 2015 according to JP Morgan. Capital progress will be helped by deferred tax assets (DTAs), considering that Lloyds is number one in the UK for negative capital deductions from DTAs. The bank restates its preference for Lloyds over RBS and following its down [...]
Osborne could finally be seeing sense over Help to Buy September 27, 2013 Analysts have welcomed reports that Osborne's Help to Buy mortgage backing scheme could be watered down, as data this morning shows house prices hitting a 2008 high. It was reported in City A.M. today that the programme's upper limit – providing mortgage support for homes worth as much as £600,000 could be reduced on recommendation [...]
YouTube hacked? Video streaming service suffers from outages for over 20 minutes September 26, 2013 Video streaming website YouTube suffered outages this evening, with many users of the service under the impression that the site was subjected to a malicious attack. At 9.22pm the error message below was visible for users trying to access the website. We don't know precisely when the problems began – but the earliest Tweet on [...]
Kocherlakota says Fed must do whatever it takes for growth – including more stimulus September 26, 2013 The Fed's Narayana Kocherlakota has repeated the phrase so popular among bankers – that they must do "whatever it takes". To Kocherlakota, that means that more stimulus may be warranted while inflation remains low. But he also thinks that the Fed may have to accept above target inflation in order to fix the labour market. [...]
Asset purchases put on hold as Bank of England can’t find its bonds September 26, 2013 A hardware failure at the Bank of England means a delay to critical announcements about asset purchases. Some piece of kit has been fried, and while essential systems such as payments have switched to a backup – non-essential services such as internal documents and record keeping won't be accessible for a few hours. This is [...]
Fed’s Stein suggests tapering rule to add clarity to central bank decisions September 26, 2013 Federal Reserve board member Jeremy Stein has a nifty solution to the lack of clarity over the central bank's decisions to begin tapering. That's fedspeak for reducing the rate of expansion of the monetary base. He's proposed that asset purchases be scaled back by a fixed amount for each 10 basis point drop in the [...]
US home sales decline accelerates September 26, 2013 US pending home sales have fallen by 1.6 per cent in August, against estimates of a one per cent fall. That's a larger decline than we saw in the previous month – when pending home sales fell by 1.3 per cent.
