Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• A few areas being pointed to for the weakness around the world (outside of markets taking a
breather following yesterday) – Unresolved political situation in UK w/Labor & LibDems working on a
coalition (raising concerns deficit reduction won’t be a focus of the new gov’t), Germany’s opposition to
the ECB’s bond buying plan (raising concerns that Europe is not united behind the bailout).
• “Volcker Rules” increasingly looking like they will find their way into the eventual Dodd bill; •
Financial regulatory reform – Sens Levin and Merkley have introduced an amendment that would ban
banks from taking positions against their clients; the amendment also would strengthen language in the
financial‐regulation bill to ban proprietary trading by banks; per Levin: “Firms like Goldman Sachs took
advantage of their customers’ reasonable presumption that when a company designs and markets a
product, the company believes that the product will succeed….Not only did Goldman know that some of
what it sold was junk, they then bet against that junk and bet against their own clients.” Bloomberg
• China home price increase hits record ‐ Nationwide, property prices in 70 cities rose in April by an
average 12.8 percent from a year earlier, higher than the annual 11.7 percent increase in March and the
fastest pace since the National Bureau of Statistics began to put out monthly figures in July 2005.
• Bloomberg News says stocks retreated last night in Asia and Europe by 1‐2% as the euphoria over
euro‐TARP gave way to questions about cutbacks and growth in Europe. Over the next few days and
weeks the big questions for investors in the US is not whether the bailout deal will hurt growth in
Europe but whether it will slow growth in Europe enough to hurt growth in the US. If not, then US
markets are likely to decouple from Europe’s. China’s markets already have decoupled as significantly
tighter monetary policy is expected in response to a swelling property bubble. China’s markets fell
further last night after a central bank advisor said the European rescue has freed China to “cool asset
prices.” – FTN
China’s Shanghai Composite – down nearly 20% year to date