Igor Radchenko/iStock via Getty Images The “sell the dollar” trade is coming up in the chatter I see. I think that economists love making international trade and finance more complicated than it should be, but that is partly a side effect of needing to publish new articles on a continuous basis. My simplistic input on this topic is that people need to stop thinking about “global rebalancing” in te...
Igor Radchenko/iStock via Getty Images The “sell the dollar” trade is coming up in the chatter I see. I think that economists love making international trade and finance more complicated than it should be, but that is partly a side effect of needing to publish new articles on a continuous basis. My simplistic input on this topic is that people need to stop thinking about “global rebalancing” in terms of flows; price changes can do the job. My guess is that the focus on flows draws from the experience of developing markets, with countries with less developed financial sectors. If a handful of rich people directly control most of the assets in a country, it is a lot easier to generate catastrophic herding behaviour. When financial assets are in the hands of professional investors, there is a more diffuse response, as many professional investors are liability matchers that have the capacity to go against the herd. Price Changes Do the Job Let us imagine that we are a foreign investor with a portfolio that has a weighting in U.S. dollar (USD) assets of 30%. (Although foreign investors might have a higher weighting in U.S. equities, fixed income assets have a home bias due to liability matching.) Let us further imagine that said foreign investors are spooked by the arbitrary legal manoeuvres of the White House and want to reduce their USD weighting to 25%. The hard way to do that is to do a portfolio analysis and move 5% of their portfolio out of the U.S. The easy way to do it is to wake up one morning and find that the local currency value of their USD portfolio has dropped by 22%. The value change can be accomplished by the dollar tanking or the assets falling in USD terms. Given the importance of equities in portfolios, generating valuation changes of that magnitude is not that hard. Besides the possible situation of Japanese investors, most foreign real money managers have relatively short-duration USD fixed income assets. (The exception would be a portfolio that has...
Investors could have turned a $410 investment in 1997 into $1 million today. Amazon (AMZN 0.31%) founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos implemented a corporate strategy that prioritizes obsessing over the customer and their wants and needs. This unique philosophy has resulted in one of the most successful enterprises of all time. Investors have reaped the rewards. Had you purchased just $410 worth of t...
Investors could have turned a $410 investment in 1997 into $1 million today. Amazon (AMZN 0.31%) founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos implemented a corporate strategy that prioritizes obsessing over the customer and their wants and needs. This unique philosophy has resulted in one of the most successful enterprises of all time. Investors have reaped the rewards. Had you purchased just $410 worth of this stock at its initial public offering (IPO) in 1997, you'd have $1 million today. But can Amazon be a millionaire-maker stock going forward? Artificial intelligence and cloud computing Amazon grew its reputation as an online store that started to sell almost everything. This segment, supported by a well-oiled logistics network, continues to be a key part of the company's success. Amazon is the second-biggest retailer on the face of the planet, behind only Walmart. In the past decade, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has deservedly gotten a lot more attention. What was once an internal cloud computing project has now grown into an incredibly lucrative business. AWS reports strong double-digit revenue growth, with operating margin that typically exceeds 30%. It has a sticky customer base that has to deal with high switching costs. And AWS is the leader in the industry, with about one-third of the market share. From a financial perspective, AWS is critical to the Amazon empire. And just in the last three or so years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been the major theme that the investment community is focused on the most, thanks to the rapid ascent of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Companies in all kinds of industries want to harness the power of AI to improve their competitive positions. AWS, which was already the dominant cloud computing platform, is now benefiting from heightened interest in AI. "Start-ups, enterprises, and governments want to move their production workloads to the place that has the broadest and deepest array of capabilities," CEO Andy Jassy said on the Q3 2025 earnings c...
Key Points Amazon remains a leading force in e-commerce, but its cloud unit is a major driver of financial success. This is no longer a risky business to own, and investors should not expect monster growth in the future. At the current valuation, Amazon shares are worth a closer look. 10 stocks we like better than Amazon › Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos implemented a corpo...
Key Points Amazon remains a leading force in e-commerce, but its cloud unit is a major driver of financial success. This is no longer a risky business to own, and investors should not expect monster growth in the future. At the current valuation, Amazon shares are worth a closer look. 10 stocks we like better than Amazon › Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos implemented a corporate strategy that prioritizes obsessing over the customer and their wants and needs. This unique philosophy has resulted in one of the most successful enterprises of all time. Investors have reaped the rewards. Had you purchased just $410 worth of this stock at its initial public offering (IPO) in 1997, you'd have $1 million today. But can Amazon be a millionaire-maker stock going forward? Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now, when you join Stock Advisor. See the stocks » Artificial intelligence and cloud computing Amazon grew its reputation as an online store that started to sell almost everything. This segment, supported by a well-oiled logistics network, continues to be a key part of the company's success. Amazon is the second-biggest retailer on the face of the planet, behind only Walmart. In the past decade, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has deservedly gotten a lot more attention. What was once an internal cloud computing project has now grown into an incredibly lucrative business. AWS reports strong double-digit revenue growth, with operating margin that typically exceeds 30%. It has a sticky customer base that has to deal with high switching costs. And AWS is the leader in the industry, with about one-third of the market share. From a financial perspective, AWS is critical to the Amazon empire. And just in the last three or so years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been the major theme that the investment community is focused on the most, thanks to the rapid ascent of OpenAI's ChatGPT...
What Broke Trade Was The Fiat Dollar Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times, The postwar trading order is taking on an entirely new shape. We can put brackets around the old one, like a tombstone: 1944–2025 . Having known some of the economists and statesmen who put together the old order, I’m in a position to explain what they had in mind and also what went wrong with it. What will replac...
What Broke Trade Was The Fiat Dollar Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times, The postwar trading order is taking on an entirely new shape. We can put brackets around the old one, like a tombstone: 1944–2025 . Having known some of the economists and statesmen who put together the old order, I’m in a position to explain what they had in mind and also what went wrong with it. What will replace it is still very much in flux but the outlines are being drawn daily. Let’s go back in time to Oct. 29, 1929 when the stock market crashed. There was panic in the air and great confusion about what to do and what not to do. However, absent any serious action by government, the financial markets began to recover over six months, even as downward price pressure on commodities began to show. Congress responded with a very large increase in tariffs. The reason was partially a holdover from what had happened two decades earlier. The income tax had replaced reliance on tariff revenue, and many members of Congress had their doubts about this change. Indeed, resentment against the income tax was growing. Reverting to tariffs and away from a drive to free trade seemed like a possibility. Many economists at the time warned about this tariff act. The concern was that this would shatter relationships with foreign markets when they were most fragile. The entire financial and industrial world at the time, including many small farmers, were concerned that this action was ill-advised. There was no love for the income tax but bringing back the tariff was deeply unpopular within professional circles. The day that President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was June 17, 1930. That very day, the stock market stopped its trajectory toward recovery and reversed. Over the course of the several weeks surrounding this act, financial markets fell fully 20 percent. Lacking another explanation, all eyes turned toward the tariff bill as the cause. A few years later, those tariffs star...
South Korean stocks swung to gains, as investors took an early drop on President Donald Trump ’s latest tariff threat as an opportunity to buy in one of the world’s hottest markets. The benchmark Kospi climbed as much as 2%, erasing a morning loss of as much as 1.2%. Samsung Electronics Co. , the nation’s largest stock, reversed an early decline and rose, as did Hyundai Motor Co. The Korean won pa...
South Korean stocks swung to gains, as investors took an early drop on President Donald Trump ’s latest tariff threat as an opportunity to buy in one of the world’s hottest markets. The benchmark Kospi climbed as much as 2%, erasing a morning loss of as much as 1.2%. Samsung Electronics Co. , the nation’s largest stock, reversed an early decline and rose, as did Hyundai Motor Co. The Korean won pared an early slide of as much as 0.7%, while bond futures edged higher. The moves show how traders are increasingly unfazed by Trump’s trade tactics, betting that he won’t actually follow through on harsh penalties often dangled as a means to win concessions. The president’s retreat from threatened levies on European nations supporting Greenland is one recent example of such “Trump always chickens out” trades. Overall, Trump has delivered on about 27% of tariff threats he’s made since his re-election, according to Nicole Gorton-Caratelli of Bloomberg Economics. “This includes temporary escalations with China in April and May that were eventually rolled back,” she wrote in a note, adding that only about 20% of tariffs implemented have stayed in place. Meanwhile, investors have continued to pour money into Korean equities even as gains in the US market have cooled . The Kospi is up 20% this year, beating the 1.5% rise in the S&P 500 Index, on a sustained rally fueled by the global artificial intelligence boom and a local corporate reform drive. Read more: Trump Vows to Raise Tariffs to 25% on South Korean Goods In a social media post on Monday, Trump said he wold raise US tariffs on South Korea to 25% from 15% because Seoul has failed to codify a trade deal between the two nations. The president said the new higher rate would apply to autos, lumber, pharmaceutical products and “all other reciprocal tariffs”. Semiconductors are largely exempt from Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned earlier this month, however, that South Korean an...
Meta Platforms (META) stock has gained about 8% over the past five days, at the time of writing, Monday afternoon, Jan. 26, according to Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is up less than half a percent in the same period. Meta is beating the S&P 500 due to prevailing ...
Meta Platforms (META) stock has gained about 8% over the past five days, at the time of writing, Monday afternoon, Jan. 26, according to Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is up less than half a percent in the same period. Meta is beating the S&P 500 due to prevailing ...