THE HOUSING MARKET STILL HAS THE BLUES, according to a widely followed barometer of home prices in the U.S. The S&P/Case-Shiller Index is designed to show how home prices are performing in the twenty largest cities and last week’s report…

Continue reading →

What is the costliest fruit?

How about an apple, as in Apple Inc.? With more than $500 billion in market capitalization, Apple is the world’s most valuable company, according to Reuters. Last week, the company reported quarterly earnings that easily…

Continue reading →

WHEN $1 TRILLION ISN’T ENOUGH… Earlier this year the European Central Bank (ECB), Europe’s equivalent of our U.S. Federal Reserve, responded to the fear surrounding the European debt crisis by offering unlimited three-year loans with a 1.0 percent interest rate…

Continue reading →

Move over European debt headlines, corporate earnings have something to say.

Even though troubles are brewing again across the pond in Europe, corporate earnings season in the U.S. is stealing the spotlight. Why? According to CNBC, more than 100 companies…

Continue reading →

DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY is apparently more than just a cliché. Research over the past 10 years shows there is a direct link between happiness and business outcomes. Author and researcher Shawn Achor says “happiness” raises sales by 37 percent,…

Continue reading →

When in doubt, blame it on the weather.

It’s human nature to want to ascribe a reason to everything that happens in the world. Rather than feeling like it’s all random, we always want to know why the market went…

Continue reading →

QUANTITATIVE EASING HAS LED TO A STEALTH “TAX” ON SAVERS in what’s been called “financial repression,” according to Bloomberg. As mentioned above, one goal of quantitative easing is to lower interest rates. On that score, it’s succeeded since interest rates…

Continue reading →

A trillion here, a trillion there and, pretty soon, you have a nice market rally.

Through a program called quantitative easing, central banks around the world have flooded the world economy with the equivalent of trillions of U.S. dollars. Quantitative…

Continue reading →

WHY IS MONGOLIA ONE OF THE WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING ECONOMIES and is there a lesson to be learned from them? While the U.S. economy languished at a 1.7 percent growth rate in 2011, Mongolia – a landlocked country sandwiched between…

Continue reading →

It was a busy week on Wall Street with numerous big moves and key milestones hit. Here are a few of the highlights:

• The S&P 500 index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had their biggest weekly gains since

…

Continue reading →