Despite endless streams of Fed Speakers proclaiming, in one form or another, that "we are at, or close to, full employment;" many in America - judging by the election of President Trump - are not feeling as exuberant as the jobs data implies they should be. The SF Fed itself now agrees: "the labor market may not be quite as tight as the headline unemployment rate suggests."
The CEO of Starbucks has been forced to quit as stockholders at the coffee giant pushed him out following his failed liberal policy of hiring 10,000 refugees. Howard Schultz believed he could impose a policy [...]
Authored by Michael Pento via PentoPort.com,
Surveys of both consumers and businesses show there is an extreme level of confidence regarding future GDP growth. Consumer confidence is now at its highest level since 2001. Small and medium-sized business owners, the driving force of growth in the economy, appear downright giddy; as the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index recently soared to its highest level since 2004.
From a practical perspective, operating leases are pretty much the same as debt. They reflect a contractual obligation on the part of one counterparty to make defined stream of cash payments to another over a set period and with an implied interest rate embedded in the payment stream. In fact, within a bankruptcy context operating leases are treated exactly the same as debt and rank pari passu with the other general unsecured obligations of a business. That said, accounting rules treat operating leases differently than debt and do not require them to be included as a liability on a compa
Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
In the early 2000s, I recommended to associates that we were in for a major gold boom. Most thought that this was a ridiculous suggestion and didn’t buy a single ounce. I continued to recommend the purchase of gold regularly over the ensuing years, and the price continued to rise. Only in 2011 did they start to buy, at a time when gold was peaking. We were due for a correction and in late 2011, it arrived.