Business

Yesterday, in an impassioned appeal to the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere, Minneapolis Fed Neel Kashkari said that the Fed is "here to serve Main Street" the same main street which currencly has $8.4 trillion in savings accounts currently earning exactly 0% in interest. Yet it wasn't Main Street but Wall Street that the Fed listened to once again last Wednesday, May 4, when the Fed's Advisory Council which comprises of 12 bankers such as James Gorman, Richard Holbrook, and John Stumpf, advised the Fed on how to conduct future monetary policy.

Every year for the past four, Goldman started off the year with an undauntedly optimism and a bullish forecast, one which usually involved a material increase to GDP expectations and, just as importantly, rising 10Y bond yields. And every year for the past four, it took Goldman a few months before it was forced to trim both its GDP forecast and cut its expectations where the 10Y would end the year.

One week ago, when SolarCity was trading around $30, prompted by Jim Chanos' bearish take on the company we wrote a piece asking if "SolarCity is the next SunEdison" in which we presented the Full Bear case as noted by Axiom's Gordon Johnson, who incidentally had the only "sell" rating on the company ahead of last night's earnings debacle (at which point there were also 12 Buys and 9 Holds), which has resulted in the company plunging 25% overnight, and is about 40% lower than when we first prompted readers to pay attention to Elon Musk's solar venture.

With the collapse of China's smoke-and-mirrors commodity bubble comes the post-mortem as the horde of Chinese gamblers flood from one government-appointed market to another as the American dream of get-rich-quick schemes appears to have been adopted by the burgeoning middle classes now disillusioned with real work. As Bloomberg reports so shockingly, from the Dutch tulip craze of 1637 to America’s dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, history is littered with speculative frenzies that ended badly for investors; but rarely has a mania escalated so rapidly, and spurred s

Every year it's the same: some legacy mainstream media mouthpiece muses on how great Obama's recovery would be... if only it wasn't for stingy US consumers refusing to spend like the drunken sailors of days gone by. Last June, it was the WSJ's Jon Hilsenrath who actually wrote a letter to American consumers, confused by their unwillingness to spend and explicitly accused them of being "stingy" even as the "Federal Reserve was counting" on them to spend, spend, spend. For those who have forgotten this absolute pearl, here it is again:

Dear American Consumer,