by Don Quijones • • Comments Off on Seed Wars: Latin America Strikes Back Against Monsanto
By Don Quijones: With more back channels and revolving doors to governments around the world, Monsanto is used to getting its way. But now it faces an outright rebellion.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on What Happens When ‘All Assets Have Become Too Expensive?’
A report from the asset management and investment banking division of Groupe BPCE, the second largest bank in France, predicts what daredevil voices at the maligned margin of financial analysis have worried about for a while: another global financial panic.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on “It’s not a bubble,” Retail Investors Are Told As The Smart Money Bails Out
“Biotech Stocks’ Rout Perplexes Analysts” the WSJ headlined the phenomenon, as analysts continue to hype this stuff to small investors. But hedge funds are dumping stocks, and private equity firms are dumping their LBOs. That’s the Smart Money. They’re getting out.
by Oilprice.com • • Comments Off on DOJ Extracts $5 Billion from Anadarko “for 85 years of poisoning the earth”
It “tried to keep its rewards and shed its responsibilities by playing a corporate shell game, putting its oil-and-gas business in a new entity and leaving behind a bankrupt shell” with environmental liabilities of defunct, polluting businesses.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on ‘Hope-for-Growth Momentum Investing’
“Why worry if the price can only go up” – Societe Generale’s Head of Quantitative Equity Research. Now even after companies cut earnings-per-share estimates, their stocks go up. Because everyone believes that everyone believes that….
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on I Just Got PayPal’s New Absolutely-No-Privacy-Ever Policy
Sunday, when no one was supposed to pay attention, PayPal sent its account holders an innocuous-sounding email with the artfully bland title, “Notice of Policy Updates.” PayPal didn’t want people to read it – lest they think the NSA is by comparison a group of choirboys.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Stocks on Speed: Leverage Spikes, As Does Risk Of Crash (Look at that Insane Chart!)
Margin debt is a crummy predictor of a crash. But it has a bone-chilling habit of peaking right around the time stocks do crash. In the last fifteen years, it spiked three times: during the final throes of the bubbles that imploded in 2000 and 2007; and now.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on The Risk of Stock-Market Vertigo
What can possibly go wrong with stocks these days? Five years of the Fed’s QE and zero-interest-rate policy, and look what happened: risks no longer exist. They’ve been priced out of the equation. But now the illusion is ending.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Will The Last Bear Please Turn Out The Lights
When BlackRock CEO Larry Fink grumbled about “way too much optimism” in the markets, he wasn’t kidding. An entire mindset is benchmarking today’s record metrics against the splendor of 2000 and 2007: not to warn, but to prove that this time it won’t end in tears.
by Oilprice.com • • Comments Off on Shell Oil: US Fracking “Revolution” A Money Loser
Shell is already steeped in its Alaska offshore debacle. Now its new boss admitted that fracking in the US, after a huge investment, is a money-losing business.