Water is essential for life. It’s quite literally an investment that you can’t live without. And while you might not be able to trade water futures on the Chicago Board of Trade, providing people with H2O is a $400 billion global industry, according to an article by Harvard’s Garry Emmons.

“In an age of global water scarcity, with governments scrambling to create new water systems or repair deteriorating ones, there is money in water,” he says. And Emmons isn’t the only expert who thinks water is soon to be a very valuable commodity. “Water is going to be more important than oil in the next 20 years,” predicted Dipak Jain, dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, to Bloomberg.

That’s thanks in large part to your local water utility. While cities and municipalities run 85% of water utilities, there are scores of for-profit companies left over to turn water

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Much to the delight of Hemispherx BioPharma individual and institutional investors, a reader and follower of StocksHaven Investments has evaluated the Price Per Share potential should Ampligen see FDA approval within the coming weeks.

The following article has been submitted by an investor under the name: Ace Spader

The much anticipated FDA decision on the Hemispherx Biopharma, Inc. drug Ampligen has held a large audience of traders glued to their computers while tirelessly posting rants and raves in various trading forums across the web. Some of the most popular topics have included wild conspiracy theories surrounding the dilutions by the company and the delays by the FDA. Others have postulated about all of the potential uses of Ampligen in the future with a particular emphasis on the pandemic flu. Of all the topics seen on these boards there is one that continues to resurface multiple times

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The Labor Department reported today that seasonally adjusted new claims for unemployment insurance fell by 34,000 to 601,000 for the most recent available week, resulting in a reduction of the 4-week average for this series for the fourth consecutive week in a row.

We have been highlighting these numbers for the last four weeks ([1], [2], [3], [4]), inspired by a brief statement that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 28. The WSJ reported that Robert Gordon, professor of economics at Northwestern University and highly regarded business cycle expert, had noticed that the 4-week average of new unemployment claims tended to peak shortly before the end of historical recessions. I was pleased to see that last week Gordon weighed in in person with his view of these data.

Black line: 4-week average of seasonally adjusted weekly initial claims for unemployment ...

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke a few weeks ago said he saw some green shoots of favorable developments in financial markets. Does today's Labor Department report that the seasonally adjusted number of initial claims for unemployment insurance fell by 20,000 workers in the most recent week constitute another?

This story in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago also caught my attention:

"There's growing evidence supporting the optimists' view, and I am surprised at that," said Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research committee that is the official arbiter of when recessions begin and end. "I was sort of in the pessimists' camp until I started looking at things."

He points to one indicator in particular with a remarkable track record: the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits. In past recessions, it has

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History was made today as Geron Corp. announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted clearance of the company’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application for the clinical trial of GRNOPC1 in patients with acute spinal cord injury. This unprecedented clearance enables the company to move forward with the world’s first study of a human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-based therapy in man.

“The FDA’s clearance of our GRNOPC1 IND is one of Geron’s most significant accomplishments to date,” stated Thomas B. Okarma, Ph.D., M.D., Geron’s president and CEO. “This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics – one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration of organ and tissue function achieved by the injection of healthy replacement cells. The ultimate goal for the use of GRNOPC1 is to achieve restoration of spinal cord function by the injection of

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The typical Econbrowser reader might not be surprised at the NBER decision -- but some others will. From a May 2008 WSJ article:

"The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession," Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear told a meeting of editors and reporters from the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.

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"I would be very surprised if the NBER, looking back at this period, would date this as a recession," Mr. Lazear said. There are even indications that revised first-quarter estimates would be slightly stronger than 0.6%. "The optimists seem to have been closer to right on that than the pessimists," he said.

Just to reiterate, that quote is from May 2008.

Here's a picture of GDP and gross domestic income (as suggested by Jim in this post, and noted in the BCDC announcement).

Figure 1: Gross domestic product (blue), and ...

A fair bit of deliberation has taken place on this site regarding stock market valuations, and specifically what is in store for the “E” component of PE multiples. In order to cast light on this matter and to incorporate insightful research into the valuation debate, I have obtained republishing permission to share with readers a study just published by John Hussmann*, president of Hussman Investment Trust. His report follows below.

With the S&P 500 down nearly 40% from last year’s highs, and now trading modestly above 10 times last year’s peak earnings level, I continue to view stocks as somewhat undervalued, in that long-term investors can expect the S&P

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University Endowment FundsUniversity Endowment Funds ListQuick Link: Hedge Fund Marketing GuideYesterday a hedge fund sent me this list of university endowments from Wikipedia and I thought I would share this with others involved in hedge fund marketing and sales.Institution Endowment (2005)billion USD Endowment (2006)billion USD Endowment (2007)billion USD Amherst College $ 1.155[1] $ 1.337[2] $ 1.662[3] ...

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire.”

– William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning, 1997

When IndyMac …