Business

Yesterday's underwhelming unveiling of President Trump's Tax plan included a "one-time tax on trillions of dollars held overseas" presumably aimed at encouraging firms to onshore trilions of dollars of cash on the cheap - implicitly creating jobs and making America Great Again.

However, as The Congressional Research Service's detailed study of the last time this was enacted in 2004 shows, the program had little effect. The program was part of the American Jobs Creation Act.

Authored by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

In a bid to fend off criticism over a dearth of achievements in his first 100 days in office, President Trump plans to sign a flurry of executive orders this week.

Among them is an executive order intended to open up new areas of offshore oil and gas drilling. "This builds on previous executive actions that have cleared the way for job-creating pipelines, innovations in energy production, and reduced unnecessary burden on energy producers," a White House official told the Reuters earlier this week.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Just recently, Wealth Management had an interesting interview with Jeremy Grantham in which Jeremy suggests the “rules have changed” for value investors. To wit:

After two consecutive quarters of disappointing earnings reports (which however failed to keep the stock down), AMZN is back to its beating ways, reporting both revenue and EPS which blew away expectations. In the first quarter, Amazon reported earnings of $724 million or $1.48 per share, a 41% increase in quaraterly profit, and some 40 cents above the consensus estimate of $1.08, on net sales of $35.71 Billion, also higher than the estimate of $35.3 Billion, and up from $19.2 billion.

A slew of disappointing data (hard and soft), government shutdown fears growing, collapsing GDP expectations, and declining earnings expectations... WTI and RBOB plunging, bonds bid, and gold higher... and then there's North Korea!!