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U.S. oil inventories at 19-year highs, OECD stockpiles are likewise at multi-year highs. With no room to store the black gold on land, traders have turned to keeping tanker ships loaded with the stuff in anticipation of higher prices to come. There are no hard numbers on the… Read More

For all of the talk of deflation these days, we’re not seeing a whole lot of it at the grocery store checkout line. Prices for grains and meats have come off their highs of last summer, but that hasn’t translated into big savings for consumers. Government… Read More

We’re sitting in the sweet spot with regards to inflation. This week we got benign readings on both consumer and producer prices, down 0.4 and 3.6 percent, respectively, on a year-over-year basis. That was the biggest drop in consumer prices since 1955 and since 1950 for producer prices. With… Read More

Recommendations this issue: Buenaventura (BVN)ASA Limited (ASA) Economists and some market seers are cheering the economy’s second derivatives these days. Articles on the subject are cropping up in high-profile publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. It seems like the term is getting tossed… Read More

We’re less than upbeat on the stock market’s prospects for several other reasons, in addition to those discussed above.  The market rally got under way in early March with the release of an internal Citi memo outlining what great shape the company was in. The memo, however, glossed over… Read More

Lima, Peru-based Compania de Minas Buenaventura (BVN) is a diversified mining company that so far has flown under the radar for most investors, but it’s likely to become a familiar name in the years ahead. Peru, which has a stable, pro-U.S. government, is the world’s third-largest producer of copper,… Read More

Stocks have rallied substantially off of their lows, gaining 27 percent since early March. Quite a few pundits have been quick to pronounce a bear market bottom is in place. But the reasons for the rally are more smoke and mirrors than actual progress in resolving the financial crisis and… Read More

Closed-end mutual funds are the orphans of the investment world, they lack the following of either open-end mutual funds or exchange traded funds (ETFs). Closed-end funds are frequently actively managed like their more popular open-end mutual fund cousins. Like ETFs, closed-end funds trade on a stock exchange and can… Read More

Much as we’d like to be bullish on the economy and the stock market as a whole, to do so now requires grasping at a lot of straws. The housing market remains in shambles. Weekly jobless claims are routinely coming in above 600,000. Consumer confidence is scraping along at… Read More

Recommendations this issue:Oceaneering International (OII)Mosaic (MOS)Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke succinctly summed up the financial situation in a recent speech, “Widening credit spreads, more-restrictive lending standards, and credit market dysfunction are working against the monetary easing and leading to tighter financial conditions overall.”At… Read More