Free Republic

It’s as if the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows have a vendetta against informing viewers about any historic news coming out of the stock market during President Donald Trump’s presidency. The major S&P 500 stock index soared to close above 3,700 Tuesday for the first time in its history (3,702.25), according to CNBC. But that’s not all. Other stocks rose to “all-time highs” as well, including the Dow Jones (30,173.88) and the NASDAQ (12,582.77). The surge in the stock market was riding on the news that Pfizer — involved with President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed — began...

The stock market rallied once again on Monday, pushing the S&P 500 into the green for the year as the benchmark completed its wild round trip amid the coronavirus pandemic. Investors are growing more and more optimistic about a speedy economic recovery as states continue to reopen. Stocks finished the day at their session highs with the S&P 500 jumping 1.2%, or 38.46 points, to 3,232.39. The equity benchmark turned positive for the year in the final moments of Monday and has now bounced more than 47% off its March low. At one point this year, the S&P 500 was...

Stocks tumbled on Wednesday as the markets remained highly volatile with the government response to the coronavirus fallout still unfolding. A violent reversal in Treasury yields in response to a potential $1 trillion stimulus package helped to unnerve investors. The S&P 500 fell 7% around 1 p.m. ET, triggering a marketwide “circuit breaker” trading halt while the Nasdaq Composite slid 6.3%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,660 points, or more than 7%. The circuit breaker halts trading across the U.S. exchanges for 15 minutes and is meant to ensure orderly market behavior. Wednesday market the fourth time in a...

Poor governance and privacy concerns have knocked Facebook out of an influential ethics index that tracks socially responsible companies.  Standard & Poor's Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index said that it had booted Facebook after the company scored poorly for social responsibility and governance, achieving 22 and 6, respectively, out of 100.  Facebook's disappointing results were due to a number of privacy concerns at the social network in recent years including “a lack of transparency as to why Facebook collects and shares certain user information”, said Reid Steadman, S&P's social and governance chief.  This includes allowing more than 150 companies...

Facebook’s mini-crash — the company’s stock is down over 13% in three days — is a reminder that even red-hot FAANG stocks can fall. Facebook FB, -0.08% took the stairs up and the elevator down. Did the Facebook shock just offer a glimpse into stock market future? Read on, and I’ll explain. Mean reversion Let’s not forget that Facebook’s stock is still up 865% since its 2012 low. For most of the past five years, Facebook has been trending higher in a well-defined trend channel. Let’s call this the “mean.” In July 2017, Facebook jumped above the trend channel and...

Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research pulls no punches in his latest Apple Inc. AAPL 1.92% In a recent note, Chowdhry called for the "completely clueless" Tim Cook to be replaced. He cited a culture of "bozos" at Apple destroying $486 billion in shareholder value under Cook's management. Apple's PE multiple under Steve Jobs was consistently above the S&P 500 PE and above 20X according to Chowdhry. The S&P 500's current 20.5X PE dwarfs the 11.5X PE Apple generated under Tim Cook and Luca Maestri leadership. The lack of reward (positive yearly stock performance) is the market's way of telling...

[from IBD: Should ETFs Be In Your Investment Portfolio?]While ETFs have existed for several decades, their popularity and diversity have exploded in recent years. But many investors are just learning about them. Those looking for tips on how to invest in ETFs just need some basic information to get started. In basic terms, ETFs can be thought of as mutual funds that trade like stocks. But their portfolios can contain U.S. and foreign stocks, bonds, futures, physical commodities or currencies. And ETFs choose the securities for their portfolios with an investment objective in mind. These investment goals include growth...

McGraw Hill Financial, parent company of ratings agency S&P Financial Services, said Tuesday that it has reached deals it hopes will finally put to bed formal debate about its role in the collapse of the housing market and the subsequent financial crisis. Resolution will cost McGraw Hill $1.5 billion in settlements — $687.5 million to DOJ, $687.5 million to settle state complaints and, separately, $125 million to California Public Employees’ Retirement System. The dispute’s origin stretches back more than a decade to September 2004 when the Federal government claims S&P began “a scheme to defraud investors” that lasted until October...

On the left is the excerpt --from the expert linked in Real Clear Markets:  A Darkening Market Sky - Anthony Mirhaydari, The Fiscal Times     By Anthony Mirhaydari, The Fiscal Times January 30, 2015 With the first month of the new year coming to a close, it's clear that 2015 is shaping up to be quite different from the smooth, easy climb investors enjoyed in 2013 and 2014.As recently as late December, the market optimism seemed indefatigable as stocks powered to new record highs on hopes for new stimulus from the European Central Bank, solid U.S. economic data and a strengthening tailwind to consumer spending...

The Justice Department is about to put the squeeze on the Standard & Poor's credit rating service for the tune of $1billion, roughly its 2014 profit, and a fine meant to send a message, according to a Jan. 12 report in The New York Times. The message: Do not tangle with the Obama administration. The charge: Standards & Poor's analysts misrepresented their sincere opinion of securities, and instead downplayed the amount of risk associated with the securities, specifically Residential Mortgage-Back Securities and Collateral Debt Obligations, in order to ingratiate themselves to the companies issuing the securities. This charge, which Attorney...

In 2011, concerned about the growing debt crisis, Standard & Poor, the venerable credit rating firm, downgraded the U.S. bond rating for the first time from “Triple-A” to “AA-plus,” a move that sent shockwaves through the financial markets raising troubling questions about the government’s growing debt. The move hit a nerve with a White House gearing up for a massive re-election campaign. Then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner called the Chairman of McGraw Hill, the owners of S&P, declaring that the government would hold S&P “accountable” and their conduct would be “looked at very carefully.” Geithner wasn’t bluffing. The Obama Administration...

Oil and natural gas are sliding again to multi-year lows, and once again it is having an influence on stocks. What's important is to understand the outsized influence this near-daily drop in oil (six months and running!) is having on corporate earnings. Even though the energy sector is only roughly 8 percent of the market capitalization of the S&P 500, the decline in earnings in that sector has been so dramatic that it is affecting earnings estimate for the entire S&P 500. On December 1st, analyst anticipated that Energy earnings for Q1 2015 would decline 13.8 percent compared to Q1...

U.S. stocks declined on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 falling for a third day, as investors weighed data illustrating a slowing global economy and tracked conflict in the Middle East. "A lot of it is spillover from Europe, the data last night wasn't so great. We had the contraction in France, slower growth in Germany, and China came out with employment numbers that were not so great. People are nervous and taking profits are all-time highs," said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade.

August 15, 2014 By Barbara Kollmeyer Oh, goody. It’s 13F time, when mere mortals like us get to see how the big boys rolled the dice in the last quarter. Among the highlights, Soros Fund Management increased a bear-call bet on the S&P 500 in a huge way. The fund lifted a put position — a bet the market will go lower — on the S&P 500 ETF SPY to its biggest size yet, in terms of value and portfolio percentage, making a 605% leap over the previous quarter. Bullion Baron, who has long kept a beady eye on Soros’s...

If the Obama administration used federal prosecutors to exact vengeance on Standard and Poor’s for downgrading the rating of federal debt, that would be a serious crime, an impeachable offense if it could be traced to the Attorney General or the President (not that anyone other than Democrats is interested in impeachment).  It would be evidence of thug government, where the rule of law has been replaced with the law of the jungle, using prosecutorial power as an instrument of political intimidation, as in Travis County, Texas. That’s why a recent court filing by Standard and Poor’s may lead to...

Standard & Poor’s downgraded Russia’s credit rating to BBB-, just one notch above junk, and warned that the nation faced a further downgrade in the event of tighter financial sanctions by members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). To prevent a big drop in the exchange rate of their ruble currency, Russia’s central bank increased its benchmark interest rate to 7.5% in an effort to trim inflation. The Central Bank of Russia raised the rate it loans to the nation’s bank by .5% following the S&P downgrade. The last time the country’s monetary authorities raised rates was in March--to...

Cyprus and Russia - what's the difference (aside from the fact that the former was a money laundering offshore center of the latter until last year of course)? If you said one is a lackey to statist, selfish banker interests, and after having its economy thoroughly destroyed by the great doomed European sociopolitical (and pathological) experiment, came crawling back to its Eurozone masters, while the other couldn't care one bit about Pax Petrodollariana and the global central bank cabal, you are right. In which case it will also be clear why a few hours ago that joke of a...

Hardball: Hell hath no fury like an administration embarrassed by a top credit-rating agency stating the obvious — that its perilous spending policies and rising debts warranted a downgrade just like any poorly run business. Speaking at a fundraiser in Philadelphia on June 13, 2008, candidate Barack Obama said of his Republican opposition: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." In this case, in August 2011, Standard & Poor's brought an embarrassing downgrading of U.S. debt to AA+ from AAA in advance of the president's re-election bid, the first such reduction in U.S. history. In...

If anyone thinks "Bridgegate" is an example of political bullying and abuse of power, then the sworn (under penalty of perjury) allegation of a corporate heavy hitter against Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner is off the charts. Bloomberg Businessweek reports: Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told McGraw Hill Financial Inc. Chairman Harold W. McGraw III in 2011 that Standard & Poor's downgrade of the U.S. debt would be met by a response, S&P said. S&P filed a declaration by McGraw yesterday in federal court in Santa Ana, California, as part of a request to force the U.S. to...

<p>Peter Barnes “Is there a risk that the United States could lose its AAA credit rating? Yes or no?”</p> <p>Geithner’s response: “No risk of that.”</p> <p>“No risk?” Barnes asked.</p> <p>“No risk,” Geithner said.</p> <p>Considering that the US was downgraded by S&P just 4 months later, one person who certainly will never forget his idiotic preannouncement, is the former Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. And being the sore loser that everyone suspected he was (although one hopes his recent well-paid move to Warburg Pincus will help soothe his sensitivity) it will come as no surprise that Geithner told the Chairman of embattled rating agency Standard & Poor's, that its downgrade of the US from AAA to AA+ "would be met by a response."</p>