The investment climate, despite the recent rebound in stocks has four pillars of skepticism: The global economy - viewed as about to collapse into a recession. There were many stories on this theme last week, using whatever recession definitions were necessary to induce worry; Policy errors by central banks have created a decline that they are now powerless to halt; Earnings estimates are too high, despite recent reductions; and Earnings "quality" is low, suggesting that financial engineering rather than sales are behind whatever reports are positive.
Weighing The Week Ahead: Earnings Recession? Will It Matter? | Seeking Alpha
Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your mobile data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers. Not all of the news websites were equal.
The ongoing slump in oil prices is forcing Saudi Arabia to retrench and bring home tens of billions of dollars that it has overseas. Bloomberg reports that Saudi Arabia has pulled out between $50 and $70 billion that it has invested around the world with asset managers. The withdrawal of funds occurred over the past six months. The staggering sum is a sign that the massive OPEC producer is scrambling for financial resources to plug its widening budget deficit, as well as cover the mounting costs for its military campaign in Yemen.
Fund Managers Have Their Own ‘Black Monday’ Thanks To The Saudis | OilPrice.com
A typical education in the west leaves you with more insight into ancient Rome or Egypt than into our financial system – and while there are plenty of books and DVDs for lay people about, say, quantum mechanics, evolution or the human genome, before the crash there was virtually nothing to explain finance to outsiders in accessible language. The City, as John Lanchester put it in his book about the 2008 crash, Whoops!, is still “a far-off country of which we know little”.