Gold stocks are near their most expensive level relative to the price of bullion in 14 months, a sign that they may start to underperform the metal, according to WJB Capital Group Inc. Gold traded at 11.5 times the level of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Gold and Silver Index in October 2008, the most ever, as the financial crisis caused by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy sparked a stock market retreat and spurred investors to buy bullion as a haven. The gap has since narrowed as the mining index more than doubled to catch up with the metal’s gain, beating gold’s 48 percent advance.
The ratio, which never surpassed 6.4 from 1984 until September 2008, dropped to less than 6 in September and was 6.3 today. Its return to the level prior to Lehman’s bankruptcy signals that bullion is likely to begin outperforming its producers, said John Roque, managing director in technical analysis at WJB in New York. (more)
I had lunch last week with Rolfe Winkler, who is an up and comer in the blog world, a thinking man’s Felix Salmon.
He is similarly annoyed with St. Warren — but rather than engage in my sophmoric venom spew, he went to the spreadsheet to discover that Buffet owns major stakes in 8 companies that have received more than $100 billion in government bailouts.
Capitalist? Hardly. Sounds more like just another crony to me.
For all the pain caused by the Great Recession, the job market still was not in as bad shape as it had been during the depths of the early 1980s recession — until now.
With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression.
In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982. (more)
