Happy New Year to you!
As you may be aware, the decline in oil prices accelerated during the fourth quarter of 2014. The main culprit was a supply and demand imbalance. Increased production in the United States, which is currently the biggest oil producer in the world, means there is an ample supply of oil. However, slowing growth in China and other countries, along with relatively warm winter weather in the United States, has lowered demand.
If you were one of the millions of people watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, then you probably got an eyeful of some of the most enticing advertisements television has to offer. They better be! According to experts, the average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial was expected to be about $4 million this year. That’s right – $4 million – up from about $3.8 million last year. Of course, it was predicted more than 100 million people would watch the game and that’s a sizeable audience! (more…)
In May, The McKinsey Global Institute released its latest thinking on disruptive technologies. That is, technological advances which have the potential to disrupt the status quo and transform life, business, and the global economy as we know it. Among the dozen technologies mentioned in the report were;
If it’s not stocks, it’s bonds!
In a turnaround worthy of Bruce Willis in a ‘Die Hard’ movie, expectations for second quarter’s corporate earnings growth soared from below expectations, on average, in the previous week to beating expectations last week. Earnings growth estimates shot up to 4.1 percent which was a significant change from last week’s 2.8 percent. Of the companies that have reported so far, more than one-half have performed better than expected – an improvement on the last four quarters’ performance.
