The Census Bureau announced today that total business sales in January did what they’d been doing relentlessly for the past one-and-a-half years: they fell! This time by 1.1% from a year ago, to $1.296 trillion,...
OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri admitted on Monday that the price war has backfired. While it still controls about 40% of global oil production, OPEC has been losing market share to US and Canadian producers....
Shares of Deutsche Bank have plunged 57% since July 31, to a new 30-year low today of €13.71. Since the beginning of the year, they lost 38%. Credit Suisse plunged 8.3% today to CHF 13.01,...
Plunges like this only occur when something big is going on. The restaurant industry has been unscathed by the economic slowdown. The meme is that Millennials like to spend their money on “experiences” – such...
“Practically boundless” future capital outflows. “Beneath all of the financial turbulence there lurks, in my view, a credit crisis; I fear the worst now,” UBS economic adviser George Magnus told Bloomberg TV today. The reform...
Chesapeake Energy is a good example. The second largest natural gas producer in the US, after Exxon, reported its debacle yesterday. Revenues plunged 49% from the quarter a year ago, when the oil bust had...
When IBM announced earnings last week, it talked about all the great things it was accomplishing to compensate for the fact that revenues had plunged 14% from a year ago to $19.28 billion, and that...
When Standard and Poor’s downgraded Dell to junk in September 2013, it cited the slump in the PC business, the pricing pressures in the sector, and the proposed buyout of the company by founder Michael...
I’ve been asked many times about the impending “death of the dollar.” I know some folks who expect the dang thing to die. They’re already envisioning the spectacle. An entire industry has sprung up to prepare...
Global automakers, still intoxicated with their own optimism after years of white-hot growth that transformed China’s auto market from a backwater to the largest market in the world, have an increasingly chilling message. The auto...
This is what two unnamed container shipping executives, one from an Asian carrier, the other from a European carrier, told the Wall Street Journal about the containerized-freight fiasco on the China-Europe route: “We are now...
Not that much has changed in Spain since the climax of the debt crisis during which its collapsing banks were bailed out. Some of them were recombined into a bank with a new name –...
