Forex Yellow Pages

by Ben Stein

Recently I found myself on the top floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza, a huge skyscraper near Wall Street. I was there to hear a panel on financial planning and to receive an award for my writings, including my writing in this space. As I waited and listened to the panel, I was overcome by feelings.

The men and women on the panel were extremely optimistic about the economy. By and large, they were convinced that recovery would start toward the end of this year, that employment would top out at around 10 per cent in 2010 and then slowly move to better levels, that the stock market had a lot of rallying left, and that even housing would soon start to recover. One panelist in particular thought banks and insurers were wildly oversold and believed subprime-backed bonds would soon correct to the upside sharply. Read more…

Warren Buffett and Munger Play the Main Stage: Views on Newspapers, Triple-A Ratings, Complex Math and More

Here are some highlights of Warren Buffett’s and Charles Munger’s remarks at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting this past weekend.

Mr. Buffett on Newspapers

Warren Buffett has long held himself out as a newspaper man. As a child, one of his first jobs was delivering newspapers. An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided. One of Berkshire’s biggest investments in the 1970s was the Buffalo News, which it still owns. Read more…

For the past seven months since the collapsed of Lehman Brothers, the banking and financial industries have taken a beat. Almost all of the financial and banking stocks in the world financial market were hitting the low point during month of February and rebounded few folds from the lows. Citigroup fall to the lowest of $0.97 (March 5^th, 2009) and rebounded to $3.12 (April 29th, 2009) and Bank of America dipped to the lowest of $3.14 (March 6^th, 2009) and rebounded to $8.68 (April 29th, 2009).

Now the question is when is the best time to get into the equity market? Any stock broker will answer NOW; even they already tell you to get in few months back and wait for the correction of the drop. Unfortunately you can almost impossible to get into the market at the lowest point and sell and take profit at the highest point. Most banking stocks now is almost 80% discount and I would enter the market with confidence that it will rebound at least 50% higher than the current market price. The suggestion holding period would be at least one year. The way to minimize risk is to enter slowly and acquire the shares whenever the market drops (mostly Friday because speculators are taking profit). This trend has been forming for the past few weeks. Read more…

*Still too early to gauge the severity of swine flu
*As traumatic as SARS was in terms of its human impact, the markets scarcely reacted to it
*This time, the global economy and asset markets are more vulnerable than in 2003
*However, if this appears to be containable in a few months as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was, banks’ balance sheets are likely to dominate -market sentiment, rather than the flu
 
Much depends on the severity of this episode – and that is a great unknown. Both economic and market impacts are almost impossible to quantify at this stage because of the many unknowns about the magnitude/severity of the swine flu. It depends on how easily the virus is spread human-to-human, the ability to detect the virus early, the effectiveness of border controls, and the mortality rate. Read more…