Blog Posts by Aaron Task

On the eve of the Fed’s two-day policy meeting, President Obama added another level of uncertainty to the event by suggesting Ben Bernanke is unlikely to remain Fed chairman after his current term expires in January.

Bernanke has “already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to," Obama told Charlie Rose in an interview that aired Monday evening.

The meeting was already hotly anticipated given the market’s obsession with whether or not the Fed will “taper," i.e. signal plans to scale back on its current $85 billion per month quantitative easing program. Now President Obama has reminded everyone about another uncertainty with the potential to move markets: Who will replace Bernanke as Fed chair?

According to a Bloomberg poll last month, current Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen is the most likely candidate to replace Bernanke. Former Treasury Secretaries Tim Geithner and Larry Summers also garnered more than 5% of votes in the poll.

In the accompanying video, Yahoo! Finance

If you were shocked (shocked!) to discover last summer that the LIBOR market was being rigged, prepare to be flabbergasted: Regulators are investigating a number of global markets that appear to be subject to manipulation.

“The probe of Libor manipulation is proving to be the tip of the iceberg,” Bloomberg reports, noting that various regulators are investigating markets including:

• Foreign exchange trading in the U.K.
• Singapore’s version of LIBOR (which stands for London Interbank Offered Rate)
• Brent crude

What all these markets have in common is a feature whereby levels are set, at least in part, by prices submitted by traders using the “honor system” vs. actual verified trades.

Related: LIBOR Scandal Latest Sign of Financial System’s Rotten Core

As Henry Blodget and I discuss in the accompanying video, it should really surprise no one that traders would manipulate markets if given the opportunity because the motives to do so are so compelling. And while these markets may seem

In honor of Father’s Day, The Daily Ticker recently sat down with George and Oscar Feldenkreis, the father and son team who run Perry Ellis International (PERY).

“I’m very happy my son decided to get into the business,” says George, chairman and CEO of the company. “That created an interest for the father to stay in the business: a lot of fathers when children aren’t interested in the business, at some point they sell the business.”

Oscar, who is president and COO, says working with his father “has been a great experience” and expressed gratitude for his 78-year-old father’s health. “Luckily he’s… still very active in the business. He doesn’t have a hobby.”

Related: Last-Minute Father's Day Deals

The company recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary as a public company and has nearly $1 billion in annual sales across its varied apparel brands, including Penguin, Jantzen, Ben Hogan, Laundry by Shelli Segal and its namesake menswear line. In addition to its own branded stores, the

The budget crisis of state and local governments has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Former New York Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch says the biggest drivers of the crisis are rising costs for health care and retirement obligations.

But Ravitch, currently co-chair of the non-profit, non-partisan State Budget Crisis Task Force, also points a finger at Washington D.C.

“Whether it’s the Ryan plan, Bowles-Simpson or the Obama plan, they all include things that accentuate problems at the state and local government level,” he says. “Fiscal stress always rolls downhill.”

Related: Whitney: The 'Shocking' Details Behind California's Budget Surplus

To that point, Ravitch says federal budget pressures are being pushed down to the state level where, in turn, they are passed along to local governments. As a result, cities like San Bernardino, California, are filing for bankruptcy and/or breaching contracts to pay pensioners and “disinvesting” in infrastructure, he observes.

When PIMCO’s Bill Gross declared last month that “the secular 30-year bull market in bonds likely ended” on April 29, it was the shot heard around the fixed-income world.

But many people wrongly assumed that dramatic declaration meant Gross was turning outright bearish on bonds. As the manager of the $293 billion Total Return Bond Fund explains in the accompanying video, that isn’t necessarily the case.

“Investors should look at the yield on at 10-year…and see whether that legitimately in this environment provides some type of return,” Gross tells me. “Six weeks ago at 1.6% [the 10-year yield] was more than skinny. Where we are now, [over] 50 basis points higher, is a much better situation than where we were then.”

In other words, price matters, and the recent drop on Treasury prices – which move in opposition to yields – has made Gross a buyer again, at least in recent weeks as the yield moved above 2% to this morning’s 14-month high of 2.27%.

This is a “decent environment to earn

“A tale of two Americas is emerging: one weighed down by debt and facing de minimis economic growth and another brimming with opportunity and nimble to invest in the future.”

That’s the thesis of Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity, a new book by Meredith Whitney, CEO of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group and former senior analyst at Oppenheimer.

Specifically, Whitney says “central corridor” states Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Colorado, Utah, North Dakota and Montana are best-positioned for fast economic growth and population migration.

What these states have in common are low taxes, pro-business policies, low population density (meaning lower housing costs, shorter commutes and better quality of life) as well as strong and stable balance sheets, especially relative to other states.

“Regardless of whether the fiscal prudence of central corridor states was the result of serendipity of good planning, the reality is these states don’t have the financial burdens now

Recent reports on U.S. housing show a market enjoying a robust recovery, one strong enough to generate fears of another bubble. On the flip side, a conventional critique is the housing market is being driven largely by institutional investors vs. private buyers, as cited here yesterday by The Guardian’s Heidi Moore and today in NYT’s Dealbook.

In other words, the recovery is illusory and another consequence of the Fed's easy money policies, which favor Wall Street speculators vs. Main Street America.

Related: Homeowners Got ‘Screwed’ Once Before, Now It’s Happening Again: Barofsky

Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, addresses both concerns in the accompanying video.

To the idea the housing market is being driven largely by institutional investors vs. private buyers, the economist has a counterintuitive response: “I’m hasty to be dismissive of the investors,” Shepherdson says. “They got the market going and I’m grateful for them.”

Similarly, he turns worries

Sell in May and go away? Not so much this year. The Dow and S&P are each up around 3.5% and the Nasdaq by nearly 5% heading into Friday’s session, which is shaping up to be a snoozer as far as major averages go. In recent trading, the Dow and S&P were each down 0.2%, the Nasdaq by 0.1%.

Of course, “sell in May and go away” refers to the market’s historic pattern of performing best for the six months from Nov. 1-April 30 and worst from May 1-Oct. 31. Since 1950, the Dow has posted an average gain of 7.5% in the “best six months” vs. a paltry 0.3% advance (and some historic declines) during the May-October timeframe, according to The Stock Traders’ Almanac.

In other words, “sell in May” might yet prove to be a good strategy in 2013 and the tally doesn’t really count until the end of the “worst six months” period.

On the other hand, this May’s gains suggest the folly of following any number of pop-culture market indicators, including (but not limited to): The Super Bowl Indicator, the