Last week, I attended Zions Bank’s (ZION) 7th Annual International Trade and Business Conference. Most of the speakers were very interesting. John Howard, the former Prime Minister of Australia, gave a lively keynote speech and subsequently fended off with aplomb the inane question of a clearly wide-eyed political science student from the university. Christopher Padilla, the United States Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade (that’s a mouthful), spoke about the opportunities in a world featuring an emerging power in China.

The one speaker that intrigued me most was Matthew Simmons …

The market takes a breather after several weeks of blistering recovery from last winter’s doldrums. Commodities all around saw amazing advances. Crude oil rose 8.3% last week and has more than doubled over the last year. I remember taking my first car, a Honda (HMC) Civic, out for the first time and pumping gas for about $1.18 per gallon. This was also in the notoriously gas-expensive San Francisco Bay Area. Base commodities and gold continue to follow oil’s lead in going the opposite direction of the U.S. dollar. Will the …

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my pessimism regarding the technology sector. The market had seemed to interpret the surprisingly good results reported by Big Blue (IBM), Google (GOOG), and even Yahoo! (YHOO) as reasons for unleashing optimism and a bargain hunting shopping spree for stocks of publicly traded technology companies. Maybe the recessionary environment and the woes faced by banks and the American consumer would not negatively impact corporate budgets for technology. My skepticism rests on the ability of secondary technology companies to weather the economic slowdown. In …

Optimism abounds with the market resolutely shaking off bad news while focusing myopically on the good, or relatively good, news. The cheerleaders on CNBC (GE) can scarcely be heard uttering the dreadful words of inflation, recession, stagnation, credit crisis, and foreclosures. Happily, they talk about earnings beats. Surprisingly, there are a number of really substantial earnings beats that seem to justify the current sanguine tone of the market.
A lot of the beats thus far have come from blue chip companies that dominate their industries and sectors. Logically, this makes sense. …

Macro

Between a rock and a hard place – that’s the scenario Ben Bernanke finds himself in as the economy decelerates drastically while inflation rises more than anticipated.

For the masochists, Nouriel Roubini proposes a perfect storm to demolish the financial markets. Of course, the probability of financial armageddon is extremely low, but you never know. Even if a handful of his scenarios come to fruition, the pain will be significant.

Do KKR Financial’s (KFN) woes signal further trouble for the private equity industry? During the height of the private equity boom, analysts …