Stephen Cooper runs companies in bankruptcy or financial distress. Past clients include Enron, Krispy Creme, and Collins and Aikman. Current clients include American Home Mortgage as this press article indicates. So how does Stephen Cooper get all the best clients? Well he is competent in business administration even if he thought he could make a viable business of Enron. But there are plenty of people competent in business administration and they didn't think that they could recover anything viable from Enron. Krispy Kreme (another Cooper business) has not turned around even though Stephen Cooper collected his "success fee". In that case - and I am not kidding - Stephen Cooper's definition of success was the elapsing of sufficient time. There is however a simple way that Stephen Cooper gets his business. He never sues past management. When he was appointed to the Enron position he simply disavowed any ...

Our April 14th call for an upper range of $130 for WTI light sweet crude is being adjusted upward to $140/bbl for the same reasons we’ve outlined before: strong world demand and that the days of easy access to sweet crude are in the rear view mirror. As one example, last week it was reported that output from Mexico’s Cantarell oil field plummeted to just over 1 mln barrels per day. True, the Mexicans could tap copious deep sea patches in the Gulf, but constitutional barriers bar the deep pocketed foreign partners from getting involved. Internal political dis-unity has prevented a constitutional change from taking place. So they’ve blown it to the point where there won’t be any deep sea production from Mexico for 20 years. James Polk and Sam …

Too severe, or not too severe; that is the question.

I’m talking about the U.S. recession that we’re already in, about to be in, or hoping to avoid.

At this point it depends a lot on how you approach the subject, but assuming for a moment that recession is inevitable, analysts and economists are asking: How much will growth contract? Can Mr. U.S. consumer muddle through, or will he stumble and fall? And how much have financial markets already discounted an official recession?

Today, I’ll answer these questions and tell you what to expect in the currency markets, namely the U.S. dollar. First, let’s address …

HOW to Identify a Recession

Unfortunately, pinpointing the magnitude and velocity of a recession before it has ended isn’t as easy as measuring the change in …

Stocks in the US are often classified by market capitalization or by style (growth, value or blend). Those differences are not sufficient to create different asset classes, but within the US stocks asset class they have produced different results.

The categories are similar in character and their correlation with the broad US market is high (from the low 80’s to the high 90’s). For those reasons, they just don’t work well as separate asset classes. That said, they may present some element of opportunity for sub-class rebalancing gains due to return rotation within an allocated portfolio.

The chart shows the return for the index of each category for each of 11 calendar years, including 1997-2007. The top half of the chart color codes each year for each index category based on the …

Stocks in the US are often classified by market capitalization or by style (growth, value or blend). Those differences are not sufficient to create different asset classes, but within the US stocks asset class they have produced different results.

The categories are similar in character and their correlation with the broad US market is high (from the low 80’s to the high 90’s). For those reasons, they just don’t work well as separate asset classes. That said, they may present some element of opportunity for sub-class rebalancing gains due to return rotation within an allocated portfolio.

The chart shows the return for the index of each category for each of 11 calendar years, including 1997-2007. The top half of the chart color codes each year for each index category based on the level of return. The bottom half of the chart color codes each year according to

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