Here in the United States, the scary days of 2008 when Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. collapsed, major auto firms needed to be bailed out and Uncle Sam injected $85 billion into a teetering AIG (NYSE: AIG) are starting to seem a like a distant memory. The bailed-out auto makers are looking stronger, the rest of Wall Street failed to buckle under as Lehman and Bear did, and much-reviled AIG is valued at more than $50 billion once again. But from Berlin to Paris to Rome to Athens, the painful… Read More

Here in the United States, the scary days of 2008 when Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. collapsed, major auto firms needed to be bailed out and Uncle Sam injected $85 billion into a teetering AIG (NYSE: AIG) are starting to seem a like a distant memory. The bailed-out auto makers are looking stronger, the rest of Wall Street failed to buckle under as Lehman and Bear did, and much-reviled AIG is valued at more than $50 billion once again. But from Berlin to Paris to Rome to Athens, the painful economic crises have never left the stage. Three years on, policy makers are struggling to come up with yet another plan to save the weakest economies in Europe without saddling the larger, healthier economies with open-ended liabilities. It’s been a Sisyphean task, trying to get that boulder up the hill — and Sisyphus is getting tired. If Europe can’t reverse course and develop a better game plan, then a whole series of events will play out, with mixed implications for equity investors. #-ad_banner-#1.  Why do the problems persist? A number of European governments run persistent budget… Read More

“You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other possibilities.” –Winston Churchill When it comes to our political leaders in Washington, let’s hope Churchill was right. If he’s wrong, then the U.S. Read More

You can’t blame Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for trying. Faced with a struggling economy last summer, he devised a massive $600-billion plan to revive the economy, known as QE2 (or the second major round of quantitative easing). Investors are surely pleased,… Read More

It’s been tough sledding for stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has dropped at least 100 points on four separate trading days so far in May, bringing a wide array of stocks down from recent highs. Lost in the negative price action is… Read More

Looking over the most recent short-interest data, a very unusual company jumped out at me: EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). Short-sellers are increasingly convinced the storage giant is headed for a fall. In the last two weeks of April, they boosted the short position in EMC by 18%… Read More

When analysts received word on March 30 that Medicare would cover Dendreon’s (Nasdaq: DNDN) pricey drug Provenge, used to treat prostate cancer, shares of the drug maker steadily rose from $35 to $43 in just one month. Read More

There are two moves every investor should make at the end of every earnings season. First, look at companies that just announced major stock buybacks, and second, look at companies where insiders have been spending their own cash to load up on their company’s stock. Both of these… Read More

In the past few years, the global investment landscape has undergone massive change. Some of the smallest and riskiest economies saw their stock markets soar, in many instances exceeding the quite impressive gains secured in the United States. As I noted back in December, some stock markets roughly tripled in value in just two years. The go-go era of emerging-market investing has come to an abrupt halt. Not a single stock market outside of Europe has risen even 10% this year. And some formerly hot emerging markets such as India and… Read More

In the past few years, the global investment landscape has undergone massive change. Some of the smallest and riskiest economies saw their stock markets soar, in many instances exceeding the quite impressive gains secured in the United States. As I noted back in December, some stock markets roughly tripled in value in just two years. The go-go era of emerging-market investing has come to an abrupt halt. Not a single stock market outside of Europe has risen even 10% this year. And some formerly hot emerging markets such as India and Peru are off by more than 10%.   The fact that European stock markets have been top gainers thus far in 2011 comes as a bit of a surprise. After all, the European Union is still wrestling with potential debt bombs in places like Greece and Portugal and voices calling for dissolution of the euro currency have not grown any quieter. But investors are willing to give some credit for a degree of corporate belt-tightening underway, and if the currency crisis can be tamed, these markets could rise yet further,… Read More

#-ad_banner-#Investing in tech stocks can be quite tricky. The biggest players such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Hewlettt-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) are struggling to find growth. The industry’s smallest players can post impressive growth in short stretches, but they can also plunge in value… Read More

#-ad_banner-#A dozen years ago, Silicon Valley was responsible for one of the most prolific initial public offering (IPO) markets ever seen. Many fortunes were made, as a record 486 companies went public in 1999. The next year was the second-best ever, with 406 additional… Read More