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(VIDEO-AT-LINK)In an exclusive interview Wednesday with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for accepting a multimillion-dollar job with a Wall Street investment bank shortly after leaving Congress. "This is wrong," Warren said in regard to Cantor's new role as vice chairman and managing director at Moelis & Co. "People work in Washington and, man, they hit that revolving door with a speed that would blind you." She went on to claim that banks hire politicians like Cantor "not because they bring great expertise and insight, but because they’re selling...

Late Monday night it was reported that former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor would take a job at investment bank Moelis.The news has already prompted the predictable eye-rolling about the "revolving door." And to the Tea Partiers who ousted Cantor in a primary earlier this year, the news that he is going to Wall Street is vindication that he was never a populist like them.But anyway, Moelis has put in a filing with the SEC, detailing his pay package (Via Erik Schatzker).From the filing:Group LP has agreed to pay Mr. Cantor an annual base salary of $400,000. Group LP has...

This morning looking in today's Real Clear MarketsGet I got a real kick out of this link that appeared :  Kick Off Labor Day Weekend With Some Depressing Charts - Quartz.   What the Quartz guys were wetting their pants over was how employee pay % total Gross Domestic Income was falling.  Here's a plot of the numbers they stole from the American Tax Payer supported BEA.gov: (Note: Freepers can't post Quartz articles because of an alleged copyright complaint)      Apparently what's really got them upset is that the evil capitalist is exploiting the American Worker and the the share for evil...

Interesting. Tried to short Burger King (BKW) which is doing a buyout of a company and shot up at one point around 19% (which is nuts). No shares available to short. That must mean the big boys have shorted all they can and know what is going to happen next.

The debate over the pending crash in the stock market seems endless. Whether or not margin debt as reported by the NYSE has relevance any more is an interesting question in a world in which the retail investor has abandoned investing (decline in liquidity). The real marginal buyers are hedge funds and some banks while the cash buyers remain central banks. The make-up of the market has changed and the interest rates are well below even many dividends. So talking about total margin debt nearing $500 billion cannot be compared just on a nominal basis. Yes, we may yet see...

Happy weekend investors!!This week's thread will have to settle for a lame blog at the top due to a severe case of writer's block.  Topics considered were a weekly recap but here's the week in stocks and here's the week in metals.  Another idea was chat about the Fed meeting at Jackson Hole but they're just wrapping it up and the Fed website isn't quite updated.  Another idea is a resume of all the good news & bad news about today's econ condx, but that either keeps changing or it's already been rehashed on these threads by better brains than...

Wall Street banks could desert Britain if the country decides to leave the European Union, senior figures in the industry have reportedly said. Some major institutions are believed to be already drawing up plans to move activities abroad amid concerns that the UK is drifting further away from the EU. Most US and Asian banks currently run their main European operations from the UK, which gives them a passport to provide services across the EU. But if the UK left the European Union, it is believed to be unlikely foreign banks based in London would carry on receiving the same...

Alternate Title:  UPTREND SPECIAL EDITION!   That's right, last Thursday IBD announced that NASDAQ had its "follow-through-day"  so investors in the driver's seat just saw the light turn green.  That said, we also know that nobody walks across a one-way street without looking both ways, and even though the signs say 'buy' here's what they've been saying so far this year-- --and this is the problem we got driving down the road while only being able to look out the back window.Remember these market designations are not arbitrary, they're signals proven with decades of research.   That said, we're still looking at a...

No matter how you look at it this is truly an amazing world we live in if everyone has more information than any time in recorded history and the only thing that's for sure is (like Sam Goldwyn said): "nobody knows nothing!"  What we got is that 2014 started out great for gold and the blahs for stocks, then the other way around w/ stocks powering up, and now we're back w/ metals out-shining stocks again.   In fact, right now the Russell 2000 (favoring small stocks) even shows the infamous 'death cross' w/ the 50 day moving average punching down...

Yo!   What we got this past week is the economy's officially in terrific shape and both stocks and metals are tanking.  Now, while it's never good to be too convinced about what we think is going to happen next in the future, I personally am having a hard time trying to decide what I think is happening right now.  Somehow the more I know about what's going on the less I know about what's going on.Oh yeah, IBD says stocks are still in an 'up-trend'.   This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a...

While this past week may have been pretty much nothing in the way of general asset growth (metals flat off --stocks flat in market under pressure), it's been a great week for geek number thingees, in fact we updated the link list to include Business Insider's Chart page (hat tip to Wyatt's Torch) and we've been into the income shifts that have turned the Great Recession into the gift that keeps giving.  Chgogal gave us the headsup to the  NYTimes piece "The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less" and Wash. Post Chart study Median household incomes have collapsed since...

I received a note the other day from a social Democrat, who wrote: “When Obama came to power the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 7,900, today it is over 17,000. When he came to power, the Federal Budget deficit was 11% of gross domestic product (GDP), today it is 2.8%. When he came to power, the economy was in a free fall and losing 8 million jobs, today it is growing and all the lost jobs have been recovered. We are poised today to become the greatest energy producer in the world and North America will produce more oil and...

Year-to-date wrap-up time.   General markets varied a lot but right now they're all together at 5-10% up so far.  Actually that's pretty good as it represents a 5-year doubling time.    click to enlarge  A closer look at stock indexes so far this year are showing roughly the same track but my dim eyes are somehow seeing us having a plateau for the past 3 weeks.  That's usually a good sign; witness the run-up after the mid-April basing. click to enlarge .As Torch says, "Discuss".  This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a list of popular...

Pick a job, any job. Outgoing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s career in Congress might be over, but he’s got plenty of suitors on Wall Street and in the National Republican Committee. Cantor was recently spotted at an exclusive Hamptons party, rubbing elbows with Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfien and billionaire investor Carl Icahn, according to Politico, and seemed to be pining for a finance job in New York. The seven-term congressman from Virginia lost his primary last month to Tea Party favorite Dave Brat. Cantor will step down from his leadership role at the end of July, but will...

 Condensed version:  this past week's metals 'n stock indexes saw a (imho) a flat decision making base --not sure how metals volume went but stocks had high volume for the dips & low for the rebounds --bearish, a situation IBD calls 'uptrend under pressure'.   fwiw, their distribution day count is running at 6 for the S&P and 4 for the NASDAQ.Fortunately I can now say what the upcoming week's going to be; it'll be "interesting".    This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a list of popular investing links that freepers have posted here...

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — It’s been almost 2,000 days since President Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, and MarketWatch felt it would be fitting to measure the stock market’s performance during the president’s tenure to this point with its performance through the 2,000-day mark of other recent presidential administrations. Obama was sworn in amid extreme financial turmoil in January 2009, roughly six weeks before the stock markets hit bottom in the depths of the Great Recession. Pretty much the only direction for stocks to go was up. How far up, though? More important, how do gains under Obama compare with...

The stock market reached a record high last week, closing over 17,000 for the first time. Good news, of course. As President John F. Kennedy famously said, "A rising tide lifts all boats." But it sure helps if you own a boat. In this case, the "boat" would be the dynamic American stock market. But investors in the stock market disproportionately come from the top 1 percent, and they hold about 35 percent of all stocks and mutual funds. The next-richest 9 percent control about 45 percent. The remaining 90 percent have less than 20 percent. While nearly half of...

  Huh.  While coming into the second half of 2014 we just had the GDP and employment rpts, and what happened is we got what seemed to be contradictory -2.7% and +6.3 bombshells.    On the other hand (Truman hated economists saying that) a look at the year over year GDP return along with the employment/population ratio puts the two together.[click to enlarge]The reason GDP growth looks solid is because that -2.7% was just one Qtr to the next, so last week's rpt tells us more about how good Q4 was than it does about how bad Q1 turned out. ...

Bill and Hillary Clinton raised from $2-3 billion in the two decades they’ve been prominent on the national stage, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal tallied the Clintons’ speaking fees, fundraising for their foundation and the sums raised for Bill Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, for the Democratic National Committee while he was in office and for Hillary Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns. Between $1.3-2 billion came from U.S. companies and industry sources, making up at least 75 percent of the sum — more than the 60 percent industry sources contributed to the two Bushes’ political operations. The Journal...

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo which sparked the war and the NYSE decided to close for the duration (more here).  This week we begin the new quarter --and the second half of 2014.  We'll see if the GDP for Q2 shows any improvement (1st report coming out in three weeks).  Imho we're in an economy where we can still make money but it's just going to take more effort. Review of last week here, reports/consensus coming out this week here. This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and...