David Hunkar submits: I selected the The Top 10 Global Electric Utilities from the “Platts Top 250 Global Energy Company Rankings” for 2009. Generally, electric utility stocks offer solid dividend yields and have slow growth. Investors love them because of their yields and their monopolistic nature in most markets. Though highly regulated, electricity companies make decent profits year over year. The Top 10 Global Electric Companies are listed below:Complete Story »

  Erick Schonfeld submits: Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft (MSFT) is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. (NWS) have been very vocal about their distaste for Google (GOOG) and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.Complete Story »

  John Jansen submits: Prices of Treasury coupon securities are posting modest losses in overseas trading. The once mighty greenback is faltering versus the Euro as that currency has gained about a penny. Gold has raced to a record high and oil is posting solid gains.Complete Story »

  David Hunkar submits: The Platts Top 250 Global Energy Company Rankings for 2009 was released by Platts this week. This is the eighth year that Platts has published the rankings. The factors used to select these top energy performers are:Complete Story »

  St. Louis Fed President, James Bullard said in a speech over the weekend that the Fed should retain the flexibility to respond through continued purchases of mortgage securities in 2010 should it see the need. In conjunction with the views of Chicago’s Evans who sees perhaps no change in rates into as far as 2011, investors are today reveling in abundant liquidity and downplaying the prospects for the U.S. dollar. Asthey do so they are reversing last week’s theme of global slowdown. Equity futures have been propelled higher by this confluence of ways once again sending the dollar down the tubes. Complete Story »

  Paco Ahlgren submits: "Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion. . . . To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection — a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end. . . . It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression. We must not forget that, for the last six or eight years, monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown."-- Friedrich August von Hayek (1932)Complete Story »

  David Hunkar submits: According to the latest data released by the US Department of Treasury, China remains the largest foreign investor in US treasury securities. As of September 2009, China holds $798.90B of US treasuries. Japan is the second largest investor at $751.50B followed by the UK at $249.3B. The top 10 foreign holders of US Treasury securities with year to date changes are shown below:Complete Story »

  Larry Dignan (ZDNet) submits: Microsoft (MSFT) and News Corp. (NWS) are reportedly discussing a deal where Rupert Murdoch would take his properties and delist them from Google (GOOG). These sites would presumably wind up on Bing. The Financial Times reported that Microsoft and News Corp. have talked about de-indexing its news Web sites from Google. In addition: The Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.Complete Story »

  Robert Herbst submits:In 2008, while the 5 remaining legacy airlines lost a cumulative $4.6 billion (excludes special charges), the 25 top executives collectively received over $90 million in compensation, averaging over $3.6 million per executive. The legacy airlines are: American (AMR), Delta (DAL), United (UAUA), Continental (CAL) and US Airways (LCC).Complete Story »

  Jett Winter submits: Hewlett Packard (HPQ) is scheduled to release Q4 earnings today, November 23nd, after the market closes. Average analyst estimates for the computer giant are $1.13/share in EPS and $30.36 billion in Revenue. Thirty analysts track the stock with sixteen upward EPS revisions in the last 30 days and no downward EPS revisions in the last 30 days.Complete Story »

  Jim Delaney submits: This past weekend I went to see a film titled “The Sun”. It depicts the final days of Hirohito’s reign as Emperor Showa of Japan at the end of WWII. During one scene the still Emperor and Gen. MacArthur are dining in the palace and the general asks Hirohito why he thinks Japan lost the war. The Emperor begins to state a few causes including overconfidence in Japan’s military might and an underestimation of the enemy but stops himself and then says he believed they lost the war because they became “insular and arrogant”.Complete Story »

  The stock market outlook remains rosy despite last week’s widespread uncertainty, with the major indexes suffering from mild profit-taking and the publication of some negative data on the U.S. economy. Mounting expectations that the ongoing economic recovery will gather further pace in the first half of 2010 are the main reason behind the persistent uptrend in stock indices. Notwithstanding a high degree of skepticism about the duration of the economic recovery (some economists indicated that it will only depend on the fiscal and monetary stimulus packages implemented by the governments. This emphasizes the risk of a relapse into recession in the coming quarters) the leading international institutions are revising up their estimates for 2010 and 2011. Last week, the OECD upgraded its 2010 growth forecasts for the biggest international economies (the 30 member countries are now seen gaining 1.9% vs. +0.7% last June), and for the first time, released its growth projections for 2011, which foresee a continuation of the global recovery (+2.5%). The equity market upswing also reflects the acknowledgement that major central banks will continue to pursue an expansionary monetary policy going forward. The Fed, ECB and BoE are not expected to raise rates in the first half of 2010, and might even leave them unchanged until late next year. As the Bank of England Governor Mervin King suggested speaking about UK economy during the presentation of the latest “Inflation Report”, a short-lived return of the UK GDP to its pre-crisis level would not be enough to make up for what the country has lost over the last two years. Expectations that major central banks will not tighten rates for a long time are impacting the Government yield curve: the differential between the 10-year and 3-month government Bond yields is over 300 basis points in the U.S. and UK and more than 280 basis points in the euro area. The graph below shows that a very steep yield curve has been traditionally followed by a very positive performance during the following 12 months in the S&P 500, the leading indicator for the overall U.S. stock market.As we suggested in the post “S&P 500: a mildly positive outlook ," the S&P 500, with an average P/E ratio for the past 10 years of 19 (broadly in line with the post-WW2 average), does not look overvalued, despite the strong rally staged in recent months. Given the positive outlook for the S&P 500, with a consequent positive impact on the whole of international indices, we recommend overweighting other equity indices.I ndeed, the weak dollar is a great concern for the U.S. stock market. Over the last few months, there has been a strong reverse correlation between the U.S, Dollar and the S&P 500. The equity market rebound has combined with a fall in the greenback and vice versa. Therefore, a new rise in equity markets might prompt a further drop in the U.S. currency, even though many indicators (including the OECD’s Purchasing Power Parity) have suggested that the US Dollar is more than 20% undervalued against the Euro. By contrast, emerging markets, which are benefiting from a reduction in the size of the financial risk premium, should be favoured more than the developed countries by the international recovery, even due to currency appreciation. Although the risk/return profile of emerging markets has worsened in the wake of the sharp rise since last March, we recommend betting on a continuation of the emerging markets uptrend.Author's Disclosure: I am long Chinese, Brasilian, European emerging equity marketsComplete Story »

  My wife and I just went through the process of buying the house that we have been renting for the past few years. The experience has given me another distasteful brush with state laws and regulations. Over the years, new laws have only been added, never subtracted, making this house purchase entirely different from the one I conducted only ten years ago.Yesterday, a backhoe came into the yard to completely expose the septic tank covers (three of them), along with an element of the leach field, which took a lot of digging to find. Why? Because the state now requires an inspector to peer into these contraptions to assure that they are working, as part of something called "Title V" regulations. Once everything was dug up, it took only a quick glance from the inspector, who had to sign off on a piece of paper before the sale could go through.Complete Story »

  Mark O'Byrne submits:Gold Gold has rallied to new record nominal highs in dollars with geopolitical concerns about Iran escalating and the dollar falling again. Possibly of more importance are increasing concerns about the unprecedented and huge public debt levels in large industrialised nations and the as of yet remote possibility of sovereign default (there are concerns that sovereign default could, like subprime, be the catalyst for the next stage in the global financial crisis). Goldhas risen and is trading at $1,166/oz, £701/oz and €776/oz respectively. Thus gold is rising to near record highs in all major currencies and is at new record highs in sterling and is very close to them in euro terms as well (gold’s record nominal high in euro was €782/oz and in sterling it is £690/oz – London PM Fix on 20/02/09).Complete Story »