Last year, China clamped down on exports of sought-after rare minerals and sent prices soaring. That action now is bringing new supplies on stream, just as demand has flattened up, causing a decline in prices that is nearly as dramatic. Rare earth elements simply aren’t as rare as they once were, it seems. An influx [...]

With the help of central bankers and their increasingly aggressive attempts to stimulate growth and ward off crises, investors felt comfortable returning to invest in risk assets in September. But questions about the longer term outlook linger. Investors rediscovered their appetite for risk during September, the final month of the third quarter, but only with [...]

The length and depth of the employment market’s recession continues to haunt U.S. politicians on the eve of the November elections. Like the Energizer Bunny, the “job market recession” just keeps going, and going, and going… It has been years since the stock market revived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and since [...]

Greece and Spain may be grabbing the headlines, but the eurozone crisis is taking a toll beyond the borders of the ‘periphery’. When it comes to events in Europe, all eyes have been on the periphery – countries like Greece, Spain and Italy – where the worst fiscal and economic challenges exist, and on Germany, [...]

The remarkable rally in Spanish stocks over the last several weeks has largely closed the valuation gap between this part of the eurozone periphery and stocks in the rest of the region. Mario Draghi’s pledge to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro sent share prices in regions on the periphery of the eurozone [...]

BRIC correlation with the emerging markets universe is rising, fueling criticism of the decade-old strategy. For more than a decade, the idea of the BRICs – four emerging market powerhouse nations – has been one of the hottest, most buzzed-about investment concepts and attracted billions of dollars from both institutional and individual investors. Now, the [...]

After the storms and uncertainties – and volatility – that have characterized much of 2012, August offered investors a relatively tranquil interlude and an opportunity for many to rediscover their appetite for risk. But few of the underlying economic problems have vanished, and some may well resurface as summer draws to a close. It was [...]

Australia’s currency seems to be decoupling from the resources industry, despite the fact that it was the latter’s boom that propelled it to its recent highs. Australia’s $1.4 trillion economy was one of the world’s biggest beneficiaries of the commodities supercycle that now appears to be sputtering to a halt amidst the global economic slowdown. [...]

Chinese authorities insist that the country is on track to generate 2012 GDP growth of 7.6%. But here are four reasons why those official figures may mask a more uncomfortable picture of the country’s real economic growth rate. Skepticism about the reliability of official economic data reported by the Chinese government has been a given, [...]

Lumber prices have climbed higher this year, albeit with a lot of volatility, but is it due to the housing market’s revival or speculation about the Fed? Speculation that the Federal Reserve will respond to the sluggish U.S. economy by announcing a third round of quantitative easing has been growing all summer – and so [...]