Today at 10:30am, president Trump will summon some of America’s most prominent corporate executives to the White House Thursday, in a roundtable brainstorming session whose purpose is to come up with policy ideas meant to facilitate trade and taxes, boost job creation and generally jump-start the US economy.
The market's relentless, grinding levitation to daily all-time highs without a pause, has some of the most prominent investors reacting in very different ways.
Last week we reported that Prem Watsa, considered by many as "Canada's most famous investor", threw in the bearish towel, when he announced that his investment fir, Fairfax Financial was covering its firm’s equity hedges after suffering a $1.1 billion net loss on its investments in Q4, and $1.2 billion for all of 2016.
Following his first interview since being confirmed yesterday with the WSJ, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke to CNBC's Becky Quick and repeated some of the key points he made yesterday, among which his hope to get tax reform done by the August Congress recess, however he again confirmed that there are too many moving pieces at this point saying it is "too early to give details" of the Trump tax plan.
America's Midwest farmers can't seem to catch a break. First, an epic collapse of grain prices over the last couple of years have threatened to wipe out family farmers (see "Midwest Farm Bubble Continues Collapse As Farm Incomes Expected To Crash In 2017") and now, thanks to the pending NAFTA showdown threatened by President Trump, Mexico, the single largest importer of U.S.-grown corn, has announced plans to find alternative grain sources in South America. Per Bloomberg:
After several months of slowing price growth across China's bubbly housing market, if mostly in the lower-tiered cities, last month we reported that China's National Bureau of Statistics confirmed that the latest Chinese housing bubble has finally popped, after housing prices across the 70 cities tracked by the NBS were up 12.7% Y/Y, below the 12.9% annual growth rate in November. This was the first deceleration in year-over-year housing price growth after 19 months of continued acceleration.