Category: Markets Written by Glen Asher

Thanks to the folks at the NYSE, we have a historical recap of monthly outstanding margin debt going all the way back to the 1950s.  Most of you will be aware of this already but margin is the means by which an investor can lever themselves into purchasing additional volumes of stock that they

Category: Economy Written by Glen Asher

Now that Janet Yellen and her fellow American central bankers have signalled that the Fed's long experiment with quantitative easing is soon to end, it is important to look back and see what impact unconventional monetary policy and the bloating of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet had on

Category: Markets Written by Glen Asher

An interesting paper by Dr. Guenter Loffler, a Professor of Finance at University of Ulm in Germany titled "Tower Building and Stock Market Returns" draws an interesting historical connection between the construction of a large number of buildings and the behaviour of the stock

Category: Economy Written by Glen Asher

A recent study, "Wage Woes" by Russ Koesterich at BlackRock examines what is missing in the post-Great Recession recovery and how this missing factor is going to impact growth rates in the economy.   Let's open with a look at

Category: Economy Written by Glen Asher

A single sentence in a recent IMF Article IV Consultation by the IMF shows us how the world's current economic situation can only be termed "unusual".   Here's the sentence:   "Negative

Category: Markets Written by Glen Asher

Now that Janet Yellen has telegraphed what the Federal Reserve will be doing next, with the economy looking rather weak at best, one has to ask, what happened to all of that monetary stimulus that Ben Bernanke implemented that was supposed to benefit the U.S. economy?