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Investor protection:

US SEC lets issuers play “Where’s Wally?”

The fine art of hiding in plain sight

The US SEC allows issuers to hide required disclosure by perceptual tricks that remind one of the children’s series, “Where’s Wally?”

These methods include burying warnings in a list of unlikely risks, incorporating facts ‘by reference’, loading documents with irrelevancies, and playing the ‘each fact in the proper document’ game.

Capital Market Taxonomy provides ready-to-use check-lists that help analysts cut through dense disclosure documents.

State finances:

SEC equates California IOUs to munis

California Governor Schwarzenegger

By July 2009, the State of California, one of the world’s larger economies, was unable to pay its bills, the result of profligate spending in the state legislature in Sacramento.

Governor Schwarzenegger was forced to issue State IOU’s to pay creditors.

The US SEC went along with this, declaring this fiat money to be equivalent to municipal bonds. As usual, California leads the country. In this case, the precedent is not good.

US equity markets:

WSJ debunks “Common Stock Legend”

The common stock emperor has no clothes ..

The long-held doctrine of blindly holding ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ is now being questioned.

Jason Zweig in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece points out that the data on which the ‘Common Stock Legend’ is based turns out to be flawed.

But then, we all knew that anyway.

Featured articles on inside pages

Stock buybacks

Accelerating to a buyback-option blowout

By Q1 2006, stock buybacks had multiplied to five times the level of 2000. Buybacks grew by 25% in 2005, with corporate profits after taxes increasing only 5.5%. At these rates, buybacks will exceed after-tax profits by 2009.
More ...

Securities Analysis

Intrinsic value

The target of classical security analysis is 'intrinsic value', a fuzzy concept defined as the value justified by the facts. Now, there may be too many 'facts' while prices exceed 'intrinsic value'. More ...

US Politics

President Obama's Lincoln moment

In mid 2009, Barack Obama found that Lincoln's saying, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time," applied to his presidency. Profligate spending and unpopular health reform ended Obama's honeymoon. More ...

US equities

Stocks surge on spurious earnings

In Q1 2009, stock buybacks came back, driving up equity prices and sparking a rally by dominating a thin market. These equity repurchases were financed from depreciation reserves and bond issues. More ...

US Bonds

The collapse of the dollar and US bonds?

The extreme spending of the Obama government, combined with irresponsible bank lending policies promoted by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, portend rising interest rates, the collapse of the bond market, and the end of dollar supremacy. More ...

World Economy

Signs of US losing its groove?

Thirty years ago, US income from abroad was more than double the amount of income that the US paid to the rest of the world. This year, or the next, this foreign income surplus may disappear forever. Is the US 'losing its groove'? More ...

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Capital Flow Watch has hundreds of articles on economics and investments.

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2010-08-13 13:07