TrimTabs CEO Charles Biderman continued his crusade against the government’s official stats and involvement in financial markets in an interview Friday with BNN. In it, he argues that the private demand — from companies, investors, hedge funds, and pensions — just isn’t there.
Large Companies Hiring, Small Companies Not; Federal Hiring Strong, States Cutting Back; Proposed Solutions; Bright Side of Fed Policies
by ilene - November 22nd, 2010 5:45 pm
Unfortunately, after reading Mish’s article "Large Companies Hiring, Small Companies Not; Federal Hiring Strong, States Cutting Back; Proposed Solutions; Bright Side of Fed Policies," most of us are not going to be happy about what Mish calls the bright side. – Ilene
Courtesy of Mish
A recent Gallup survey suggests Larger U.S. Companies Are Hiring; Smallest Are Not
Gallup finds that larger companies are hiring more workers while the smallest businesses are shedding jobs. More than 4 in 10 employees (42%) at workplaces with at least 1,000 employees reported during the week ending Nov. 14 that their company was hiring, while 22% said their employer was letting people go. At the other extreme, 9% of workers in businesses with fewer than 10 employees said their employer was hiring, and 16% said their employer was letting people go.
This Gallup question about company size is new, so it is unclear whether this pattern is a continuation of, or a change from, the past.
Hiring Also Much Higher at the Federal Government
The federal government is hiring more employees than it is letting go, while the opposite is true for state and local governments. More than 4 in 10 federal employees (42%) say their organizations are adding people and 21% say they are letting workers go. In contrast, state and local government employees report a net loss of workers.
Pitfalls, Flaws, Observations
There are huge flaws in the survey as well as a potential for additional flaws in analyzing the survey results. Nonetheless there are some important observations that can be made.
For starters, it is nice to see large corporations hiring, but there is no indication of by how much. Is the total headcount hiring 1 or hiring 2,000? Is the number up or down from last month?
Compounding that lack of information, we have seasonal flaws. Many retailers are now ramping up hiring for the Christmas season. So… is the hiring temporary or permanent?
The survey does not say. Moreover it does not say why they are hiring. Is business expanding or is this a short-term need?
That aside, the survey is not useless by any means. If this expansion was getting stronger, the number of companies hiring would be going up. It is not. Worse yet, small businesses which are the lifeblood of job creation, have not participated in the hiring…
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With Stocks, It’s Not the Economy
by ilene - July 25th, 2010 9:21 pm
Decoupling between stock prices and the domestic economy – and Zachary Karabell explains why he believes this trend will continue. – Ilene
With Stocks, It’s Not the Economy
By Zachary Karabell, courtesy of TIME
Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME
From the beginning of May until late June, stock markets worldwide declined sharply, with losses surpassing 10%. The first weeks of July brought only marginal relief. Ominous voices began to warn that the weakness of stocks was a direct response to the stalling of an economic recovery that has lasted barely a year. Anxiety over debt-laden European countries — most notably Greece — combined with stubbornly high unemployment in the U.S. to create a toxic but fertile mix that allowed concern to blossom into full-bloom fear.
The most common refrain was that stocks are weak because global economic activity is sagging. A July 12 report by investment bank Credit Suisse was titled Are the Markets Forecasting Recession? With no more stimulus spending on the horizon in the U.S., Europeans on austerity budgets and consumer sentiment best characterized as surly, the sell-off in stocks was explained as a simple response to an economy on the ropes.
It’s a good story and a logical one. But it distorts reality. Stocks are no longer mirrors of national economies; they are not — as is so commonly said — magical forecasting mechanisms. They are small slices of ownership in specific companies, and today, those companies have less connection to any one national economy than ever before.
As a result, stocks are not proxies for the U.S. economy, or that of the European Union or China, and markets are deeply unreliable gauges of anything but the underlying strength of the companies they represent and the schizophrenic mind-set of the traders who buy and sell the shares. There has always been a question about just how much of a forecasting mechanism markets are. Hence the saying that stocks have…
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The Big Apple
by ilene - March 31st, 2010 2:42 am
The Big Apple
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
Apple ($AAPL) now has a market cap of around $215 billion. Incredible, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving company – they’ve changed the world.
More astonishing than the number itself is the list of companies whose market caps have been eclipsed by the tech king…
Apple is now bigger than Berkshire Hathaway, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Google and JPMorgan Chase.
The only companies larger right now are Microsoft, ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart.
One other thing to consider – it all started with a device shaped like a deck of cards that was created to compete with the Sony Walkman - The iPod. Think of how many millions of devices sold as a direct consequence of the triumph and mass adoption of iTunes and the iPod. The dollar value created on the back of that product pairing is absolutely mindboggling.
For the details of who stands where by market cap, click the link below.
Source:
The Most Valuable Companies in America (Fortune)
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TrimTabs CEO: The Government Must Be Buying Shares
by ilene - January 11th, 2010 2:02 pm
Tim Iacono at The Mess That Greenspan Made and Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock on TrimTabs’ Charles Biderman’s talk on the strange action the equity markets. – Ilene
"The only logical buyer is the government"
Courtesy of Tim Iacono at The Mess That Greenspan Made
From last Friday on BNN, Charles Biderman of TrimTabs talks about the odd goings on in U.S. equity markets last year where low volume and the lack of identifiable buyers have caused more than a few people to suspect that things are not as they appear.
Biderman says that in after-hours S&P500 futures markets, as little as $5 to $10 billion a month in buying could be responsible for a large part of last year’s gains and, when you think about it, $5 to $10 billion a month for the U.S. government in 2009 was "chump change".
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site