Via Jesse's Cafe Americain blog,
Apparently the Banks have been lobbying heavily, and expending significant amounts of money again, leaning on their Congressmen and pressuring regulators, saying that their capital standards need to be relaxed so that they can make more loans to stimulate economic growth.
But that, according to the FDIC Vice-Chairman, is utter nonsense.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between an investor’s purported level of sophistication and their returns in recent years. At least, that’s what one might assume when comparing the historical aggregate return of US households with that of the hedge funds community.
Fake News A US Media Speciality
Paul Craig Roberts
Authored by George Friedman, Xander Snyder, and Ekaterina Zolotova via MauldinEconomics.com,
The US Congress has passed new sanctions targeting Russia’s energy companies. Among the other notable aspects of the sanctions is that they take some authority away from the US president (who used to be able to implement some measures but not others at his discretion) and give it to Congress.
Retail stocks have been annihilated recently, despite the economy eking out growth. The fundamentals of the retail business look horrible: Sales are stagnating and profitability is getting worse with every passing quarter.