Finance Geek

Wall Street has failed to grasp that consensus earnings estimates have no bearing on a company’s financial health. Plus: Why mining stocks (wrongly) get the shaft.

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During the 1890’s, gangs of bank and train robbers terrorized the Wild West. Over a century later, global commerce faces another set of outlaws. Only now it happens with a point and click of a mouse, instead of a gun.
In a bygone era, four or five years ago, most cyber fraud consisted of hacking into personal accounts, to steal victims’ identities and credit card information. Since then, activities have morphed, on an exponential scale, to encompass the financial service industry worldwide, and all its commercial customers. The black hats, churning out about 40,000 variant samples…

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“A currency, to be perfect, should be absolutely invariable in value.” David Ricardo, in Proposals for an Economical and Sound Currency, 1816, sec. ii.
A past Wall Street Journal headline tells the tale of what passes for acceptable commentary when it comes to China and its currency policy. The headline was “Zoellick Sees Yuan Too Low,” the Zoellick in this case being Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank.
Zoellick can of course claim a lot of establishment compatriots when it comes to his views on the yuan, including Treasury secretary Tim Geithner and the…

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The United States is headed into a very important election in November of 2010, if the political pollsters are to be believed. Americans, besieged by a weak dollar and an even weaker economy, are reassessing some of their most basic assumptions about how the country works. RealClearMarkets has recently published columns on the mistakes of the Bush Administration along with others calling for higher taxes to pay down the national debt. Important as these subjects may be, they are only symptoms of a much larger malady.
The public is really scratching its head as long held assumptions prove to…

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Spotify’s longstanding effort to launch in the United States was reportedly sent “back to square one” due to the derailment of its negotiations with one or more major labels. However, the company tells Wired.com that the report is bogus, and that it is still on track to launch here by the end of the year.

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Treasury yields fell Friday, with the 2-year note hitting a record low 0.55%, after the government said U.S. GDP grew a weaker-than-expected 2.4% in the second quarter.

Get used to both more weak economic data and lower Treasury yields s

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Facebook ‘will probably’ put off until 2012 the IPO it hasn’t even acknowledged thinking about much yet, three people tell Bloomberg News. That adds about a year to the latest idle speculation of when Facebook might let its 500 million members (or anyone) become owners, as well.

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A survey conducted by the Associated Press found that economists predict that economic growth will slow to less than 3% and unemployment will remain high in the second half of the year. The study’s conclusion comes in the wake of a series of disappointing

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Provided by Business Insider, July 30, 2010: Awesome story from Bloomberg about how, well, awesome it is to walk a way from your underwater home. …

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The countdown has begun. The Bush tax cuts don’t expire until the end of the year but Fox Business News has begun airing “countdown” segments, as of late, claiming the end of tax cuts will lead to the “Largest Tax Hike Ever.”

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Economy: Speaking to the Urban League on Thursday, the president had a great chance to tout his accomplishments. Sadly, when it came to the economy, he had to stretch the truth quite a bit just to say anything.
President Obama’s main topic in speaking to the big city representatives in Washington, D.C., was education. But what struck us was his blithe recitation of what he believes he has achieved on the economy.
It bears deconstructing, because in the upcoming election, a whole lot of claims are going to be made that are simply untrue. Yet, they’ll be repeated by the mainstream…

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