Despite turbulent times, U.S. markets are rising again. But is this a temporary bump, or the return of a bull market? The sharp-eyed analysts of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs say its the latter, and their money is on strong growth ahead.
Some investors have been running scared after the quake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan and left it with an ongoing nuclear crisis. But when there's gloom in the air, there's also opportunity to buy on the dip and gain from the rebound.
Despite all the worry over the impact of rising oil prices, recall that the U.S. is now a largely services-based economy. And observe that the rising wages that have led to real overall cost rises in decades past are nowhere to be found today. Exhibit A is in Wisconsin.
They're gearing up for a potentially damaging round of currency interventions to help keep their economies competitive, especially against China. Says Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega: "This is a currency war that is turning into a trade war."
For the 22nd-straight month, the central bank kept its target interest rate at 0% to 0.25%. It made no new asset purchases and no changes to QE2, its $600 billion, eight-month bond-buying program. Housing and hiring are two main areas of concern in a slow-growth economy.
Interest rates are the price of money, and though that price is near zero right now, the cost of low interest rates to our nation may be too high. Low rates are squeezing savers, seniors, banks and pension funds, and the benefits we're supposed to see from them don't appear to have arrived.
When the economic gurus at the Fed move the levers of U.S. monetary policy, they do so with two often-conflicting goals in mind: promoting maximum employment and keeping prices stable. Many critics are now arguing that that Fed should focus solely on prices.
When QE2 is complete, the Fed's bond purchases will have injected $1.7 trillion in liquidity into the markets since 2008 in an effort to boost corporate investment in new production and new jobs in the U.S. Instead, companies are taking cash raised here and investing it in emerging markets.
The more lenient lending policies enacted by the Federal Reserve last month have so far failed to increase demand from small businesses, indicating that the federal government's attempts to spur the U.S. economy through more aggressive monetary policy may need more time to take effect.
Analysts lately have loudly proclaimed the end of the dollar, leaving investors looking to stay ahead with a choice of betting on stocks, which have 17% fallen in the last decade, or staying "safe" in very low-yield money market funds. But there is an alternative: commodities.