Business

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

GE has the largest pension shortfall in the S&P 500. It’s a $31 Billion Balance Sheet Hole That Keeps Growing.

At $31 billion, GE’s pension shortfall is the biggest among S&P 500 companies and 50 percent greater than any other corporation in the U.S. It’s a deficit that has swelled in recent years as Immelt spent more than $45 billion on share buybacks to win over Wall Street and pacify activists like Nelson Peltz.

 

One year ago, when Deutsche Bank was sliding on concerns about its bad loan book, Germany's Bremer Landesbank which at the time had €29 billion in assets, saw its bonds plunge overnight when concerns emerged about an imminent failure by the German lender.

One week ago, we reported that UBS has some "very bad news for the global economy", when we showed that according to the Swiss bank's calculations, the global credit impulse showed a historic collapse, one which matched the magnitude of the impulse plunge in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis.

But why is the credit impulse so critical?

Below looks at the Gold/US Dollar ratio on a weekly basis over the past decade. The ratio peaked in 2011 and has created a series of lower highs. The ratio looks to be testing a very important price point, that could be very important to Gold Bulls.

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE CHART ABOVE

Authored by Arthur Berman via OilPrice.com,

The lead editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal was pure energy nonsense.

“Lessons of the Energy Export Boom” proclaimed that the United States is becoming the oil and gas superpower of the world. This despite the uncomfortable fact that it is also the world’s biggest importer of crude oil.