Economic Overviews

Monitoring how Beijing is managing China's slowdown, and whether it will be able to rebalance its growth, are highly important as weakness in China will weigh on U.S. stocks. Given the ongoing structural reforms, government policies and global economic conditions, certain sectors within China have surfaced as winners while some are surprisingly becoming losers, which provide long-term investing opportunities. This article identifies the sectors that are winning, losing and remaining neutral.

Economic expert and best-selling author, David Stockman, offers a dire view of the deep financial trouble America faces in his new book titled “Trumped!” in which he is quoted as saying "The rubes are revolting, and they are revolting because they can see the system is rigged. These people are fed up, and they have had enough, and I think this is where Trump is coming from. I think we are at an inflection point where someone is finally challenging the Wall Street/Washington elites. Trump is kind of a wild man in some ways, but he hasn’t spent the last 30 years in Washington drinking the Kool-Aid."

Donald Trump is promising change, and many of his proposals sound good (and, yes, there are also some areas to be concerned about), but Trump's plan stops well short of the fundamental overhaul of our economic and financial systems that is required. That being said, what he is proposing is vastly superior to Hillary Clinton’s plan so he should definitely be applauded for at least moving in the right direction. Below are some of his economic proposals "to save the U.S. economy."

Trying to gauge where the economy is headed is almost always a waste of time. Instead, focus on the emotion and trend (price action); the trend is always your friend.

In a long-term strategy which employs both investments, there is a case for putting an over-weight on housing, and an under-weight on gold, given current relative price levels unless one is specifically investing for financial crisis.

With the Olympic Games underway, many eyes are on Rio...[and, as such,] investors...are...directing more attention to Brazil. While its stock market has had one of the world's best performances to date this year with the MSCI Brazil 25/50 Index up more than 50%...[and] the MSCI Brazil Small Cap Index...[up] over 60%, the question now is, can the rally continue? My take is that it could potentially, but investors need to be willing to accept significant risk. [Let me explain.]

According to the New York Federal Reserve, 14% of the U.S. population lives in households that have “negative” wealth. In other words, these are households that have more debts piled up than assets, which puts their net worth in minus territory. In today’s chart, we compare the data on negative wealth households with the data on their positive counterparts. There are some obvious and stark contrasts.

Italy has overtaken Spain to become the weakest link among the Eurozone’s largest economies, with a banking sector desperately in need of a bailout and, if Italy’s banking crisis is a rerun of Spain’s, we can certainly expect some troubles in the Eurozone and, consequently, for the Euro.

Stocks don't have to immediately melt down today or next week, but it does mean that there’s a lot of risk percolating just below the surface – and El-Erian is worried that when it does bubble up, it could be more like a volcano than a hot spring.

What follows is a modern day parable which, if it wasn't so true, would actually be funny. A Japanese company (Toyota) and an American company (General Motors) decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race. Below are the results.