Before the open today Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), the nation’s largest electronics retailer, announced a pretty good fiscal (ended Aug 26, 2006) second quarter. Same store sales in the United States were up 3.0% in the three months ended Aug…
You might have noticed that gas has become alot more expensive the last couple of years. One reason for that is that oil, the raw material from which gas is produced, has gotten more expensive due to growing demand around…
Driven by torrid growth in China base metals have experienced a phenomenal bull market the last few years. Copper has gone from around 75 cents/lb. three years ago to more than $3.50/lb. today. Nickel has gone from around $2/lb. towards…
Bill Bonner, the Founder of Agora Financial, a contrarian investment newsletter company of which I am a big fan and subscriber, and author of, most recently, Empire of Debt, has some interesting, and entertaining, thoughts on the issue of kids…
When Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001 it ended an era of relative global peace that had begun with the fall of the Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. …
A few weeks after each Fed meeting, the minutes for that meeting are released. The minutes are not an actual transcript of what was said but a shamelessly doctored summary. As I tried to explain a couple weeks ago the…
A couple weeks ago DataQuick, the excellent real estate information firm providing data primarily for the California market, came out with its July 2006 numbers. The Sacramento Bee ran a sobering article based on the report: July … saw the biggest drop…
Stephen Roach, Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley, had some noteworthy things to say about the bursting of the housing bubble and its effects on the US and global economies in his most recent two commentaries at Morgan Stanley’s Global Economic…
After the bell on Wednesday women’s retailer Chico’s FAS (NYSE: CHS) warned that August same store sales are showing a decline of about 3% and that it sees dismal same store sales for its third quarter, according to the Wall…
The Wall Street Journal today published an editorial, “The House the Fed Built” (subscription required), echoing the interpretation of recent Fed history I posted a couple weeks ago: This is the housing market the Federal Reserve built. That is to say,…