Beware: the Japanese could intervene again February 1, 2011 THE famous samurai and military strategist Miyamoto Musashi once said: “If the enemy thinks of the mountains, attack like the sea; and if he thinks of the sea, attack like the mountains.” The Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) strategy to keep the yen weak against the dollar, however, is probably not that sophisticated. It intervened by [...]
FED EASING SET TO CONTINUE: LOCKHART January 31, 2011 UNEMPLOYMENT in the US is “nowhere near acceptable levels,” a senior Federal Reserve policy-maker said last night. “Accommodative Fed policy is still required,” said Dennis Lockhart CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, suggesting that the Fed’s $600bn (£375bn) asset-purchasing scheme (QE2) will continue, along with historically low interest rates. Joblessness in the US [...]
FED HAS DONE A GOOD JOB ON US EQUITIES January 31, 2011 THE Federal Reserve has so far done an excellent job of goosing US equities through its ongoing asset purchase programme. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has intimated, boosting stock prices is now one of the Reserve’s aims, on top of its officially mandated dual role of ensuring price stability and full employment. So investors were [...]
THE WEEK AHEAD January 30, 2011 COMPANY NEWS ● Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will launch the first iPad only newspaper on Wednesday, The Daily. ● The oil giant Exxon Mobil reports earnings today. ● As does budget airline RyanAir, which releases its third quarter earnings results today. ● Tomorrow the iPhone chip manufacturer ARM Holdings releases its fourth quarter results, which [...]
A waste of talent January 27, 2011 FILM REVIEW HOW DO YOU KNOW Cert: 12A I WANTED to like this film, I really did. It’s the work of James L Brooks, the Simpsons’ producer. It’s got talented stars in Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd, and it’s been praised for being an intelligent romcom. Well, it may be intelligent and it has the [...]
US Treasury starts to tackle debt limit January 27, 2011 The US Treasury has initiated the first in what is likely be a series of manoeuvres aimed at preventing it from hitting its legal debt limit, as a political battle over spending intensified. The action to reduce the amount of money the Treasury holds in a special account at the Federal Reserve marked a small [...]
Fed reassures as Dow surges past 12,000 January 26, 2011 THE Dow surged past 12,000 yesterday for the first time since June 2008 before eventually closing at 11,985.44, after a series of positive news was followed by a reassuring statement from the Federal Reserve. The Fed will keep interest rates low and maintain its policy of quantitative easing (QE2), it announced last night. “The economic [...]
Diary January 26, 2011 DAVOS DIVAS Davos this year might have drawn headlines for its first ever quota for female delegates, but there’s one group of women the event has always catered for: the “Davos wives”. Anya Stiglitz, wife of the economist Dr Joseph Stiglitz (pictured together), has this year been spilling the beans in a series of blog [...]
S&P hits highest level for 29 months January 26, 2011 THE S&P 500 closed at a 29-month high yesterday led by gains in tech and commodity shares, as investors largely ignored the US Federal Reserve’s lukewarm economic assessment. The stock market had little reaction to the Fed, which said high unemployment still justifies a $600bn bond-buying programme that has helped equities rally in the last [...]
DOLLAR-YEN COMES OUT OF THE SHADE January 25, 2011 DIRECTOR OF CURRENCY RESEARCH, GFT AFTER DROPPING to a low of ¥80.93 at the end of last year – a move that induced more than a few heart palpitations among policy makers in Tokyo – dollar-yen has steadily climbed higher in January as the American economy has shown clear signs of improvement. Today’s federal open market [...]