A fairly quiet start to the week for most of Asia with the Nikkei closing with virtually no movement. The Nikkei was weak just after the opening down just over -0.5% but as the JPY lost ground, the index recovered. Initial price action was poor given the Trade data release (-1.3% given forecasts were 4.7%) […]

The week ended with Asia happy to see consolidation as the name of the game. All core indices closed weaker in Friday’s trading, but it was interesting to see that the Nikkei has lost ground whilst both Shanghai and Hang Seng continue to make ground on the week. The JPY is back flirting with the mid […]

The press has really become a total disgrace. The press conference of Trump was fairly straight forward and he took questions from even some of the worst of the worst like CNN. The journalists will not stop. I watched the reviews of ABC news to see if George Stephanopoulos would be just neutral – no […]

  In the earliest days of the Republic Rome’s taxes were quite modest, and were not direct, but were a property tax or a wealth tax on all forms of property, including land, houses, slaves, animals, money and personal effects. The basic rate was just 1% and sometimes it would occasionally rise to 3%. This was to fund the […]

  Europe could become the site of a new global war in the East as tensions build there against refugees and the economic decline fosters old wounds. The EU is deeply divided over the refugee issue and thus it is fueling its own demise and has failed to be a stabilizing force. After five days of […]

  The question of when will central banks fail is a popular one that comes in. Suffice it to say, the turmoil will hit Europe first. While so many people blame the Fed for all sorts of things, you must realize that Roosevelt usurped the Fed during the Great Depression and imposed a single interest […]

A quiet market for many in Asia ahead of Chinese New Year and the subsequent national holidays. In Japan the inflation data was marginally better than previous (+0.1% v’s prev. +0%) which helped the Nikkei add additional gains but were slowed somewhat by Consumer Price data. However, this had an effect on the JPY which […]

The 2017 outlook report provides an overview of the world economy by connecting the dots globally.  We have looked at the Trump Rally or Trump Bubble that dominates the financial headlines as well as the question of Free Trade coming under assault by Trump and the rising trend of protectionism. We have paid close attention to Greece […]

  The 2017 outlook report provides an overview of the world economy by connecting the dots. Included is a global table on the yearly level for all major world markets that includes 2016 closings, buy and sell signals for annual closings, trading prices (as of the completion of this report), resistance, support, and the historical high […]

Of course, the left is focusing on how much the “rich” pay while ignoring the entire issue of taxes. When I debated Steve Forbes and Governor James Florio at Princeton University, it was the Democrat Florio who I turned. I simply said that the tax code borrowed from the poor and middle class, handed them […]