September 15, 2011 – 3:05 pm
I hate to go all morose and contrarian on another “up” day in the markets, but … Jerome Booth, research director of London-based emerging markets specialist Ashmore Investment Management, makes an interesting point in a Sept. 14 Financial Times column. He posits that global markets are moving, slogging really, through the classic five stages of grief. When [...]
August 16, 2011 – 10:48 am
A quote of the day for investor relations professionals, from National Investor Relations Institute President and CEO Jeff Morgan in his “IR Weekly” email and blog post under the heading “Market Mayhem”: Market volatility reached new extremes last week as we experienced global market moves of positive to negative 5% from one day to the next. [...]
August 10, 2011 – 2:36 pm
While the markets are going crazy, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., is out visiting bank customers and employees on a bus tour in California – and giving an interview today with CNBC. His core message: Cheer up, America! That’s not bad advice for investor relations folks, either. Dimon doesn’t mince words about shortcomings [...]
August 8, 2011 – 12:07 pm
The President has pulled into the lead, ahead of a three-way tie among the Treasury secretary, “Other” (write-ins Ben Bernanke, Paul Volcker, Bill Clinton and “Someone who’s fluent in Chinese“) and “Oh, never mind!” What do you think? Not a political comment … just a little comic relief amid wild days in the markets.
Are we in recession again? Weak recovery? Heading for Financial Crisis 2.0? No wonder more than a few CFOs and IROs have been wringing their hands over what guidance to provide investors as part of the second-quarter reporting season. If you’re looking for an example of softening guidance by widening the range, Procter & Gamble [...]
Tom Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a skeptic on loose monetary policy and the state of the world’s biggest banks, is convinced the United States still hasn’t heeded the lessons of the last financial crisis. During an otherwise happy gathering in our hometown, the “CFO of the Year” awards [...]
November 2, 2010 – 9:00 pm
Of the talking heads on the airwaves and op-ed pages, George Will is one of my favorites – for his insights and the way he offers opinions calmly, without shouting. I appreciate two things Will said on Sunday about the US midterm elections. Regarding GOP gains in Congress possibly causing gridlock in Washington, which many pundits greatly [...]
October 1, 2010 – 7:37 am
October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. - Mark Twain, American humorist, 1894 At a NIRI meeting last night in Kansas City, I commiserated with a friend over dinner about the state of the economy. [...]
September 10, 2010 – 8:19 pm
Effective corporate governance springs not so much from lists of rules as from the human element of relationships between boards of directors and top managers, according to a veteran director of companies such as Ford Motor and Estée Lauder. Irv Hockaday, former president and CEO of Hallmark Cards (and Kansas City Southern before that), spoke today at [...]
Institutional investors are relying a bit more for equity research on mid-sized firms, regional brokers and industry-sector specialists as the bulge-bracket investment banks continue to reel from the effects of the financial crisis, Greenwich Associates reports in its 2010 U.S. Equity Analysts Study. Investor relations people reaching out to analysts might consider the changing sell side [...]
