Emerging Markets

Iowa-based Casey’s General Stores operates about 1,700 convenience stores in 11 Midwestern states. It’s facing declining margins, higher input costs and an increasingly competitive environment for cigarette sales, one of its primary products. In addition, higher capital expenditures and negative free cash flow mean that Casey’s General Stores is ringing up signs of poor earnings [...]

China’s July exports grew just 1% from a year earlier, missing forecasts (+8.6%) by a big margin. Reuters story Refresh data  Edit data New banks loans from Chinese banks also fell short of expectations, extending 540.1 billion yuan of new local-currency loans in July. Refresh chart   Edit chart          

Behind the ugly economic news coming out of Europe – as the eurozone seems to be heading into its second recession in less than three years – lies a still more ominous set of data that is likely to have repercussions for Europe’s economy and the choices available to its policymakers for many years to [...]

Emerging markets have faster growth, lower debts and better demographics than developed countries, so you might expect their equity markets to trade on a premium. They don’t. Historically, investors have placed a higher multiple on developed markets – this may have been justified when developing countries seemed more likely to hit a crisis. Now that [...]

This may have been a bumpy year, one that not all of us are eager to revisit. But we hope that the series of charts that follow will give new perspective on the events of 2011 and fresh insight into the economic landscape within which we will be navigating come January 1, 2012. Unquestionably, the [...]

Why do markets reflect such bearish bets on one of the fastest growing economies in the world that has more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves? Reuters answers this question and finds that hedging against a meltdown in China may have gone too far. View the Reuters Special Report