Brett Hutley's Blog » current events

The Weirdness of Equity Markets

brett — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:04:07 +0000

Equity markets constantly surprise me. It's looking increasingly likely that the Eurozone will disintegrate - leading to potential bank failures, stagnant economic growth and increased unemployment - and the equity markets here in Europe are pretty much shrugging it off today. The FTSE100 is up over half-a-percent at pixel time.

It's like the equity participants are saying to themselves "Well, we had a down day yesterday, so it must have been oversold, right?". During the last financial crisis it was like that as well. There would be a big fall one day, and then the stocks would rally somewhat, and then another big fall... rinse and repeat.

Maybe everyone is afraid of missing out on the bottom. Don't worry - I think it'll be a while before you have to worry about that.

Detroit – Ground Zero for Economic Collapse

brett — Mon, 11 May 2009 10:55:04 +0000

Here is a video showing how badly Detroit has been affected by the collapsing housing market. Towards the end of the video you can see some amazing mansions in the worst-hit areas of Detroit that you can supposedly buy at a massive discount.

Financial Turmoil

brett — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:17:46 +0000

This past week has been facinating in the financial markets. After a long slide downwards, the markets tumbled at the beginning of the week, and now they are bouncing back upwards.
Initially the market dive looked like it was triggered by worries over the problems with the Monoline Insurers.
The Fed responded by cutting interest rates by 75 basis points on Wednesday. This seemed to have little effect with various indices falling even further. It did however seem to have a dramatic effect on the probability that the US will go into recession.
On Thursday we found out that Societe Generale lost $7 Bln from trader fraud (leading the market wags to dub it "Shock Gen". This seemed to have little negative impact on the markets with the indices all shooting upwards. They are all up today, albeit not as much as yesterday. It looks like the momentum is leaving the bounce.

So could the massive falls be attributed to Soc Gen selling out of their positions and realizing their losses? Can some of the market euphoria be attributed to proposed monoline bail-out?

I guess we'll see how next week develops!

Fire on Oxford Street!

brett — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:08:07 +0000

I heard the sound of sirens, so went to our balcony to see what was happening. There were fire trucks and police and a bank of red buses queued up. It all seemed to be centered a couple of blocks from our apartment. Helen and I walked down the street and I snapped a couple of pictures.

Birthday Post!

brett — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 17:15:58 +0000

Another day older today. Helen made me breakfast - sausages, bacon, mushrooms - which we ate on the balcony overlooking Oxford Street. I have been having a completely self-indugent day, watching DVDs and playing on my notebook. Almost too lazy to post a blog entry! I figure I’ll type something up to mark the day.

Tim and Anna and kids should be arriving from Tokyo, so the evening may be structured around bottles of champagne in their hotel room. Just a guess.