Industry

Only one week after PayPal announced cutting ties from Libra, several other partners from the 27 companies in the Libra Association including Ebay, Visa, Marcado Pago, Mastercard, and Stripe announced this week that they would also stop supporting Facebook’s Libra project. [more]

Quarterly results from the four largest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo) showed better than expected results as American consumers continued to support the economy. [more]

The net worth of U.S. households continues to increase while, at the same time, households’ leverage continues to decline. What this means is that U.S. households’ asset values are rising at the same time that risk aversion continues strong. This is a relatively healthy situation. [more]

Piper Jaffray conducted its 38th biannual survey of U.S. teens – overall spending decreased by 4% with YouTube, Nike, and Amazon popular among this demographic. [more]

There was a sharp rise in interest rates in the final two days of last week. This moved key yield curve ratios away from Inversion levels and resulted in the Recession Barometer in the USA falling to 8.0x from 9.0x. Canada went on a recession Count-Down as of August 8. [more]

A big merger terminated, an IPO delayed and the first cannabis ETF down almost 60% in share price this past year, has the bloom fallen off the cannabis flower? [more]

As income investors in Canada and the U.S. continue to face the challenge of a low interest rate environment, the equity market dividends continue to lure investment dollars. [more]

Most of the yield curve ratio combinations that we follow weakened this past week. However, the most important metric, the 10-year/2-year ratio, actually widened. We will continue to monitor closely U.S. interest rate developments and yield spreads. [more]