With the 52nd Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting - dubbed the "Woodstock for Capitalists" which is "unique in corporate America, a celebration of the billionaire's image and success" - now in the history books, all that's left are the quotes and avuncular aphorisms.
The steady rise of online retail sales should have surprised no one. As Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, back in 2000, less than 1% of retail sales came from e-commerce. However, online sales have climbed each and every year since then, even through the Great Recession. By 2009, e-commerce made up about 4.0% of total retail sales, and today the latest number we have is 8.3%.
Here’s another knowledge bomb: it’s going to keep growing for the foreseeable future. Huge surprise, right?
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,
Two weeks ago Bank of America caused a stir when it calculated that central banks (mostly the ECB & BoJ) have bought $1 trillion of financial assets just in the first four months of 2017, which amounts to $3.6 trillion annualized, "the largest CB buying on record."
When one of the world's largest oil hedge funds announced it had liquidated its entire long position, we suggested he would not be alone... and according to the latest CFTC data, he was not.
The last two weeks have seen hedge funds liquidate over 120,000 WTI crude futures contracts (120 million barrels worth or approximately $6 billion notional).