Foreigners are turning their noses up even more at U.S. stocks and bonds.
Foreign investors unloaded $56 billion more in long-term U.S. securities than they bought in November, according to the most recent data from the Treasury Department. A month earlier, they sold $36.6 billion more than they bought.
U.S. investors sold $34.3 billion more in foreign long-term securities than they bought in November.
The hills are alive with the sound of meetings.
This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, looks set to be a gloomier affair.
Last year, the meeting’s theme was “The Power of Collaborative Innovation,” and U2 singer Bono was among the big headliners. This year’s theme is a little more sober: “Shaping the Post-Crisis World.” The forum begins Wednesday.
Circle of life.
The market’s a jungle, and a JPMorgan strategist has a rating system more apt for it. Instead of “buy,” “sell,” and “hold,” Thomas Lee rates things on where they are in the “circle of life.”
Financial assets, he says, track through the same four stages — they peak, break down, eventually bottom and finally recover again. So what’s peaking now? Treasury bonds, which have surged. In more traditional Wall Street-ese, that means Treasurys are close to shifting from an “overweight” rating to an “underweight.”
Flat times for LCD prices.
Is the great price fall coming to an end for flat-panel televisions?
Prices have been tumbling for years, making high-definition sets more affordable. It also, though, crimps margins for such companies as Corning, which makes glass for LCD TVs. Prices for a 32-inch LCD television, for example, were half as much in the second half of January as they were a year earlier, according to market researcher DisplaySearch.
But when compared with prices from two weeks earlier, they were flat. It’s the second two-week period in a row that prices have remained steady sequentially.
