Displaying items by tag: economy

As the economy’s taken a wicked turn toward the dark side, the clamor for fixed income ETFs has parachuted, according to usnews.com.

Peng Cheng, JP Morgan strategist, explained that this includes retail investors, who hopped on the bandwagon last month, loading into credit ETFs like SPDR Bloomberg High Yield Bond ETF and the share iBoxx $ Inv Grade Corporate Bond ETF.

Earlier in the month, a new series of exchanged-traded funds launched, the US Benchmark Series. That will help ease they way for individual and institutional investors to trade the must updated individual benchmark U.S. Treasuries, which will shone a light on the maturing ETFs in the fixed income category, according to reuters.com. "This gives (investors) a tool to say, we really want to focus on how we execute our investment strategy, as opposed to how effectively we trade Treasury bonds," said F/m President Alex Morris.

Dems are including a 1% tax on share buybacks in Biden’s climate and tax bill which is being pitched as an inflation bill. The tax was included to get Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema on board with the legislation. Most analysts say this will raise tensions with Wallstreet as investors will be apprehensive about the impact immediately and what it opens the door to moving forward. Many companies have recently engaged in massive buybacks using the excess profits to reinvest in their own companies. Experts say this could generate a lot of revenue, more than the carried interest which is expected to bring in $14 billion.

Finsum: Buy back boogeyman at it again. This legislation stops companies from doing the most responsible thing they can with excess cash.

High levels of unemployment continue to plague the labor market despite available jobs...See More

(Rio de Janeiro)

The international monetary fund cut its growth projections globally this week. The advanced economies are still expected to keep pace, but the low-income developing countries are lagging. Many low-income countries are lagging in vaccine coverage and their exports are suffering because of this. These exports slowing led the IMF to cut the growth projection for Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam from 4.3% to 2.9%. There is a slight trickle into larger economies as worker shortages have hurt American companies such as Nike. China remained robust to most of the slashes as its 2021 projection only dropped from 8.1% to 8.0%.

FINSUM: Don’t look for these growth projections to bear out in emerging markets if vaccine rates tick up. However, Fed tightening could slow growth in dollar-dependent countries.

(New York)

There has been a quite a bit of consternation over the current labor market, and with good reason. Over a million people have applied for unemployment assistance ever week for over 4 months. All told, over 30 million people have lost their jobs. However, there is an encouraging trend: unlike in past recessions, there is still plenty of hiring going on. New job postings have not plunged the way they did in the past. In previous recessions, including after the Crisis, a lot of unemployment had to do with a combination of attrition and a lack of hiring-much more so than outright layoffs. However, that does not appear to be happening now as job postings are still holding strong at their 2015 levels.

FINSUM: This is an encouraging sign for the economy and for individual job seekers. There is still a chance that demand hollows out—especially if we have another full scale lockdown—but for now things look positive.