It is worse than anyone thought on Wall Street

Daniel Pinto, CEO of JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank, just made a gloomy prediction for Wall Street. He said that the firm’s investment-banking revenues are forecast to be down 25% in the first quarter. Markets revenues are down 20% year-on-year, Pinto said, speaking at JPMorgan’s Investor Day conference. Importantly, Pinto noted, the start to 2015 is a tough comparison period for markets revenues because …

Donald Kaul – The Stock Market: The Only Game in Town

The stock market is down. It must be some crazy thing China has done. Those Communist countries just don’t understand how capitalism works. No, wait! The market just went up. Did China fix its capital markets already? Not really. More likely it’s that our Federal Reserve has hinted that it’s not going to raise interest rates any time soon because …

Sarah Lazare – Cover Up? TTIP Negotiators Outed for Secret Talks With Big Tobacco About [Redacted]

Screen shot from heavily redacted correspondence between European Commission and British American Tobacco, dated 15 May, 2014. (Document provided by Corporate Europe Observatory) European Union officials face charges of evasion and cover up after concealing basic information about their negotiations with tobacco companies over a pair of pending “trade” deals, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), in response to a …

Peter Lee – Making Sense of China’s Stock Market Meltdown

I suppose much of the journo commentariat was born since 2008 and therefore has no memory of TARP, Too Big To Fail, or Jamie Dimon rolling around naked inside a gigantic vat of taxpayer money, so there has been a considerable amount of handwring about how the CCP defiled the purity of the stock market by flinging a trillion or so …

Dave Johnson – What China’s Currency Devaluation Means

China on Monday announced it is lowering the value of its currency about two percent in order to boost its economic growth by supporting its exporters. Traders are betting that the currency will fall further. Markets around the world are reacting negatively. What does this mean? Bloomberg Business has the currency story, in China Rattles Markets With Yuan Devaluation, China …