eu (3)

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Is Brexit Truly The End Of The EU Itself?

The vote has come and gone. A major European nation has chosen to leave the EU. The markets have had their obligatory decline. A weekend has passed. It is time to think about what exactly has happened… and what it means, if anything.

The real drive to leave had little to do with economics. It had a great deal to do with immigration. The EU’s economy has been in wretched condition since 2008.

The EU has been unable to forge a plan that would fix dire unemployment in southern Europe and revive the stagnant economy. The EU’s founding treaty promised prosperity. It has failed. Germany has the healthiest economy in Europe, but even it struggles to grow.

The case for staying in the EU was that leaving would ruin the British economy. This assumed, of course, that staying in a broken union would help the economy. The logic of that escaped me. It is hard to see any economic benefits that would be lost. As I put it in my book Flashpoints, “Britain will avoid the destabilization in Europe by pull

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The Global Economy: April 2016

The global economy has regained some composure, according to asset management firm Schroders. In their view, markets have regained a risk appetite following action by central banks, the normalization of commodity prices, and a lack of materialization for tail risks such as a U.S. recession or a Chinese hard-landing:

economic-infographic-apr-2016.jpg

While volatility is indeed near its YTD low with the benchmark VIX down 32% since the start of the year, we would point out that this is potentially some calm before the storm.

Here are some upcoming waves, and we’ll see how they break:

Earnings and Buybacks: The blended earnings decline for the S&P 500 so far in 2016 Q1 is -8.9%, according to Factset. When earnings season is done and if this stays on target, it will mark the first time the index has seen four consecutive quarters of year-over-year declines in earnings since Q4 2008 through Q3 2009. That said, companies are doing whatever they can to stifle these declines via share buybacks. S&P Dow Jones says that nearly

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EU To Investigate Offshore Corporate Tax Havens

1290741?profile=originalBeing reported in the Wall Street Journal, the EU to Investigate Corporate Tax Codes in Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands after criticism of their tax rates for Corporate offshore havens.  AAPL specifically being mentioned in the news as theirs use of favorable Irish tax laws allowed it to pay just a 3.7% tax rate on non-U.S. income during its last fiscal year. That, in turn, is a big reason $132.2B of Apple's $150.6B  cash balance at the end of FQ2 was offshore.  Tim Cook was grilled by Congress last year over Apple's offshore tax payments; Cook responded in part by calling for an overhaul of the oft-criticized U.S. corporate tax code.

Of course there has been an ongoing push up on the Hill for another "tax holiday" where Corporations can repatriate overseas funds.  This being met with resistance as the 2004 tax holiday saw the funds spent, not on R&D and job creation, but largely returned returned to shareholders via dividends and buybacks; acts which were specifically prohibited....

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