Financial Markets and Economy
China Bond Defaults Seen Rising as Borrowing Costs Climb in 2016 (Bloomberg)
Chinese corporate defaults will likely spread next year as borrowing costs climb, financial companies surveyed by Bloomberg said.
Toshiba seeks more funds for restructuring: Nikkei (Business Insider)
Toshiba Corp <6502.T>, reeling from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal, intends to ask for an additional 300 billion yen ($2.49 billion) in credit lines by the end of January to fund a large-scale restructuring, the Nikkei business daily reported.
Toshiba is likely to approach multiple financial institutions including Mizuho Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, Nikkei reported, citing Chief Financial Officer Masayoshi Hirata.
2015 year in review: The S&P 500’s winners and losers (Market Watch)
Yes, it’s that time of the year again. You can expect to see myriad year-end reviews of stock market performance, as well as predictions for 2016. We thought it would be interesting to list the three best and worst performing stocks for each S&P 500 sector, and show which of these stocks are favorites among analysts.
Russia ETF Investors Whipsawed as Oil Weakens Recovery Prospects (Bloomberg)
Price swings in the biggest exchange-traded fund investing in Russian stocks increased to the widest levels in three months as oil trading around an 11-year low worsened the outlook for the world’s largest energy exporter’s economic recovery.
Apple on track to deliver about 75 million iPhones in first quarter (Market Watch)
Apple Inc. is on track to deliver about 75 million iPhone units in its first fiscal quarter, Stifel analysts said Monday, citing the latest data from two key Chinese provinces where the smartphone is manufactured.
Data released over the holiday weekend on November mobile phone exports from the Henan and Shanghai provinces support the broker’s outlook, analysts wrote in a note.
Icahn Sweetens His Bid for Pep Boys to More Than $1 Billion (Bloomberg)
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn raised his offer for Pep Boys to $18.50 a share in cash, or more than $1 billion, escalating a bidding war with Bridgestone Corp. for the car-parts chain.
One graph shows how the likes of Netflix and Spotify are eating the DVD and CD businesses (Business Insider)
It won't come as a surprise to learn that on demand streaming services are eating into DVD and CD sales.
Stocks slump to begin last trading week of the year (Yahoo! Finance)
Stocks slipping to start the last week of the trading year. With the S&P heading back to even for 2015, is this the end of a much needed Santa Claus rally?
Stocks falling after the holiday break include Chimerix, Valeant, and Iconix Brand Group – the company behind Badgley Mischka, Joe Boxer and even 'Peanuts' down big after revealing it formed a special committee to review an accounting irregularity after receiving a formal order of investigation from the SEC.
Gold Declines as Investors Zero In on Outlook for Inflation (Bloomberg)
Gold dropped for the third time in four sessions as the outlook for low U.S. inflation cut demand for the metal as a store of value.
Gains for consumer prices remain tepid, a government report showed last week. While inflation hasn’t reached the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent goal since April 2012, policy makers in December raised interest rates for the first time in almost a decade as the labor market improved. Higher rates coupled with stable inflation erode investor demand for gold, which doesn’t pay interest or offer dividends. The metal has dropped almost 10 percent this year.
It's looking like the US auto market could narrowly miss an epic number in 2015(Business Insider)
Car makers will report December sales in the US early in 2016. At that point, we'll know whether 2015 turned in a truly historic final total.
The big number is 18 million. Over the course of 2015, the US market has been running at or above that sales pace.
Some analysts are predicting that December sales will be strong, but not quite strong enough to hit the big one-eight.
Hedge Funds Add Wagers on Dollar Strength After Fed Raises Rates (Bloomberg)
Hedge funds and other large speculators boosted net positions that profit from dollar appreciation after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2006.
Wall Street in 2016: What could possibly go wrong? (Business Insider)
By all rights, 2016 should be a good year for the U.S. stock market.
The Federal Reserve's recent rate hike signals confidence in the economy and presidential election years typically reward investors. Most experts are predicting a seventh year for the current bull market, with strategists in a recent poll expecting the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index to end 2016 at about 2,207, roughly 8 percent higher than it is now.
Why the bull market will not die in 2016 (Yahoo! Finance)
U.S. markets are open for the last week of trading of 2015 after an extended holiday weekend. It will be another shortened week as most markets around the world close on Friday, New Year’s Day.
Chesapeake Leads S&P 500's Losers as Gas Price Slump Deepens (Bloomberg)
Chesapeake Energy Corp. is having its worst year since 1998 after halting dividend payouts, slashing drilling budgets and cutting one of every six employees failed to rescue the energy explorer from the deepest gas-market rout in 16 years.
There's one sector hedge funds are just itching to shake up in 2016 (Business Insider)
It's almost 2016, so Business Insider has asked a bunch of the smartest minds on Wall Street to tell us what they think will happen next.
Here's a prediction for the activists, the hedge funds that buy up shares of companies in the hope of effecting changes that will boost the company's stock price and make money for shareholders.
Asia stocks subdued as oil resumes fall (Reuters)
Asian stocks were subdued on Tuesday, with Japanese and South Korean equities slipping, after crude oil prices resumed their slide and cooled investor sentiment.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan were effectively unchanged, and looked set for a loss of around 12 percent for the year.
U.S. Gas Exports Seen as Big Gain for Asia, Small Loss for U.S. (Bloomberg)
An impending flood of U.S. shale gas into the global market stands to lower the price of the heating fuel in Asia by almost 5 percent while marginally raising costs to customers at home, a study commissioned by the U.S. Energy Department shows.
The Texas economy is getting smoked (Business Insider)
It's ugly in Texas.
Wall Street Predicts Corporate America's Bond Binge Will Go on (Bloomberg)
Wall Street’s biggest dealers are forecasting that blue chip U.S. companies will sell more than $1 trillion of bonds for a fifth straight year in 2016 as corporate America’s borrowing binge endures beyond the end of the Federal Reserve’s zero-rate monetary policy.
China Fault Lines: Where Economic Turbulence Could Start in 2016 (Bloomberg)
China's leaders are striving to cut leverage while restructuring growth away from an over reliance on investment and toward greater consumption and services.
Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts – Kabuki Bonus Time (Jesse's Cafe Americain)
There were no silver deliveries reported, and JPM took another slug of gold for 'delivery.'
Politics
For most of Martin Gurri’s 29 years working for the Central Intelligence Agency’s open-media group (now the Open Source Center), the world was very different from the one we now inhabit. “When I started out in government,” Gurri recalls in an interview, “it was a perfectly reasonable expectation that an analyst could absorb all the meaningful political information coming out in a day from even a very developed country like Britain or France. And, of course, now if you tried to do that your head would explode.”
George Soros blasts Donald Trump, Ted Cruz as fearmongers (Market Watch)
Billionaire investor George Soros on Monday blasted Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz by name, accusing the pair and others of deliberately stoking terror fears.
In an op-ed article published in the Guardian newspaper, Soros, a major Democratic donor, argued that ISIS is operating from a position of weakness as its grip on its home territory weakens, but acknowledges that coming up with a resolution to the threat posed by terrorists and by the Syrian conflict isn’t easy.
Technology
The First Look At The Second Google Glass (Fast Company)
Pictures on the FCC website show Glass for Work's foldable hinge. Reports suggest hundreds of companies are already testing it.
It might surprise you to know that after the widespread derision aimed at the first version of Google Glass, the tech giant is readying a second iteration, and now we know what it will look like.
A Fan-Powered Hoverboard That Actually Hovers (Popular Science)
Arcaboard In Flight
This was the year of the hoverboard, and sneaking in just under the wire is another brand new design, by Arca Space Corporation. The Arcaboard, as they’ve dubbed it, creates a levitating platform through the simplest possible means: a ton of electric fans, 36 to be exact. It might not be pretty, and it may only fly for six minutes, but it is for sure a boardthat hovers.
Health and Life Sciences
Should Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Include Opioid Overdoses? (Forbes)
Drug overdose deaths in the United States skyrocketed to 47,000 in 2014, mainly due to opioid painkillers and heroin, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). There were 18,893 deaths involving prescription opioids in the country in 2014, up 16% from 2013. There were 10,574 heroin-related deaths in 2014, up 28% from 2013. Deaths involving drugs like fentanyl and tramadol, synthetic opioids, increased by 79% from 2013-2014.
Life on the Home Planet
Can the Planet Be Saved? (The Atlantic)
The two words “climate” and “change” are so routinely strung together that just saying them as a pair—“climate change”—seems to somehow obscure the full weight of the phenomenon they describe, to say nothing of its consequences. But in those moments when one pauses to consider the ramifications of human activity on the planet for generations and generations ahead, things can feel beyond bleak. And yet: This past year saw the nations of the world reached their first-ever agreement on an ambitious plan to rein in emissions, perhaps the most significant progress yet made on this issue.
The Arctic emits more methane than we thought (Futurity)
Until now scientists assumed the Arctic tundra was releasing almost zero methane when the soil surface is frozen during the cold months, which run from September to May. But a new study suggests that’s not true.
