Josh Stern

Obama Is Bad for the Economy - Barron's

The current issue of Barron's includes a much better article on tax policy by Gene Epstein entitled "When Is a Tax Cut Really a Tax Hike? Usually" which points out that since all Federal expenditures must eventually be matched with revenues from somewhere or else devaluation of the currency, low tax advocates would do better to focus on controlling spending. Epstein says that Democrats and Republicans alike have failed to do that, but the graphs in the article showing the growth of spending as a percentage of GDP over time make it clear that percentage based Federal spending has generally declined under Democratic administrations (going back to the early 1960s) and generally risen under Republican administrations.
s.wsj.net/public/resou...

Is the Equities Party Over?

Congratulations. It really takes some big balls to make a predictions based on a trendline where you show the data that was used to fit the trend and the reader can clearly see from your graph that the fitted slope is much lower than it would be without data from 1800-1850.

Stocks: The Long View

Forward earnings are probably too high *and* the 2000 bubble was silly. Unfortunately, it also seems silly to suppose that the two wrongs cancel each other out and somehow allow precise quantification in the running aggregate.

Market Outlook Continues to Be Bullish

Energy prices ultimately factor into so many consumer costs it's hard to calculate them all. Imagine you buy something from Amazon.com that is made of 1/2 plastic, 1/6 assorted metals, 1/6 rubber, and 1/6 silicon, fabricated in Eastern China from materials gathered around various parts of the world , and air shipped to your door...then try to add up all the places where energy cost contributed to what you received (including electricity). When oil goes up, gasoline at the pump goes up much quicker than the cost of the consumer product, but either its cost goes up or the profits of the producers/services go down.

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