While there is still mystery about why Wall Street and foreign bourses have gone all weak-kneed in 2014, I suspect: the polar vortex producing record-breaking cold weather through much of the USA early in December and even more icily during the first weeks of the year. This seems to explain the oddball statistics on joblessness which came out since then: low levels of hiring but many people dropping out of the jobless pool because they stopped looking for work. It also may explain the rush to buy Christmas presents on the Internet rather than in retail shops, and the failure of shipping companies to get them to recipients in time for the festivities.
Today another blizzard is predicted for the USA and airports are again shut and people with jobs told to stay home.
If I am right, the current ‘meh’ stock US markets are not necessarily setting a trend for the rest of the year. You can read statistical projections until your eyes glaze over, but there is no simply answer telling us if by various ratios like yield or price to book or price to sales – or that old hoary favorite, price to earnings – are high, low, or normal. But has the weather been abnormal!
The Economist this week did a multi-market survey of how exchanges are too high and reader WVS asked if I was taking a defensive posture. The answer is no. My failure to adopt a selling posture is influenced by the UK stock and currency boom. Plus good yields. I have a couple of meetings later today which may change my outlook.
We have been decade-long friends of the talented Shashi Tharoor, civil servant, novelist, chronicler of sports, cinema history, and Nehruvian policies in his native India. Shashi worked as a UN bureaucrat and was not backed by his own Nehru-successor government when he ran to become UN Secretary General. Asian Ban Ki-Moon got the job and Shashi returned to India, leaving in NYC his divorced first wife, a professor, and their twin sons. With him went his high-maintenance new wife, a redhead unsuited for India’s sun.
Shashi informed us and others of his doings by blogging. He ran for parliament in his Malayalayalam homeland and then joined the government as deputy foreign minister.
In 2010, Shashi had to resign that position because of an imbroglio over a bid he made for a Premier League cricket team in his constituency. It was for new fast 20-20 cricket (less boring than the old and very profitable for club owners.). Details are fuzzy but one Sinanda Pushker, a rich Indian divorcee then living in Dubai, may have been a hidden beneficiary of Shashi’s bid.
In a few months, the redhead got divorced and left for less sunny climes, Shashi had married Ms. Pushker, and went back into the cabinet in a lowlier position. Last week Ms Pushker blogged that Shashi was having an affair with a Pakistani lady journalist, Mehr Tarar, who was “stalking†Shashi. The Tharoor couple flew to New Delhi arguing loudly on the plane. After they booked into their Delhi hotel, Shashi left for several hours and on returning discovered Sinanda Pushker dead in their room. The verdict appears to be that she overdosed on prescription pills.
