Business

What do you do when you're part of an industry that has levered up $100's of billions of dollars in investor capital and paid a handsome premium for pretty much every asset available all while "excess cash sits on the sidelines" because there are just no deals left to do at remotely attractive valuations?  Well, if you're Investindustrial, a European private equity fund founded by Italian dealmaker Andrea Bonomi, then you simply raise a new fund to buy all the investments of your old fund.

The St. Louis Fed's FRED Blog has released an interested piece showing the geographical distribution of America's subprime borrowers.

From Francesco Filia of Fasanara Capital

Oil: a weak present and no future

Oil correction (~10% from peak) is not necessarily the foretell of an imminent debacle. Oil corrected by approx. 20% twice in the past months (June-July 2016 and October-November 2016), without derailing the bull trend. Important supports were breached in both instances, and yet Oil managed to resurrect, powerfully.

Complacency about U.S. stocks has become so widespread that losses may lie ahead, according to Brian Belski, chief investment strategist at BMO Capital Markets. In a report Friday, Belski cited the ratio of the S&P 500 Index’s price-earnings ratio to the VIX Index, "which essentially shows how much investors are willing 'to pay' for a given level of market risk."

As Bloomberg notes, the ratio rose this month to its highest reading since 1994.

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

The Federal Reserve would like to raise target interest rates because of inflation concerns and concern that asset bubbles are forming. Part of their concern seems to arise indirectly from the rise in oil prices, relative to their low level in early 2016.

Figure 1. WSJ figure indicating likely reasons for rate hike.