The Traderszone Network

Yale professor Robert Shiller’s recent warning on the valuation of U.S. stocks, bonds and housing sent ripples through global markets, but one analyst told CNBC the professor is “dead wrong.”…

The company reported better-than-expected second-quarter revenue as it recovered most of the outdoor product sales it had missed in the first quarter when a severe North American winter hurt results of Lowe’s and larger rival Home Depot Inc (HD.N). Lowe’s said it cut its sales growth forecast to about 4.5 percent from about 5 percent to take into account its year-to-date sales. “We believe home improvement spending will continue to progress in tandem with strengthening job and income growth,” Chief Executive Robert Niblock said in a statement.

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If bad economic news continues to translate into good news for investors, any sharp acceleration of the world economy from here could well kill off the long-running equity bull market. While a mid-summer wobble in global markets was blamed variously on anything from peripheral European bank woes to regional political conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East, it’s the familiar “bad news is good news” trope that’s won out.

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Russians are backing Vladimir Putin as he confronts the U.S. Putin’s popularity is soaring, along with consumer confidence and a gauge for “social comfort.” Another set of data reveals an abrupt change in a country that reveled in consumerism after the collapse of communism. While Putin’s ratings are still on the rise, analysts and researchers in Moscow say the deteriorating economic data highlight the risk of allowing politics to trump prosperity.

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Bank of China Ltd. more than doubled its money set aside for bad loans as profit growth cooled to the slowest pace in five quarters on weakness in the economy. The nonperforming loans of China’s fourth-largest bank surged to 85.9 billion yuan, the highest in more than five years, as companies struggled with repayments in an economy at risk of the weakest full-year growth since 1990. “The biggest concern for Bank of China is their asset quality,” Chen Xingyu, a Shanghai-based analyst at Phillip Securities Research, said by phone.

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* Labor markets to be major focus of Fed annual retreat WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (Reuters) – Mike Yack has left the workforce twice in the last eight years and calls himself retired, yet at age 62 the former General Motors employee does not consider his working life over. Yack, who says he can get by on Social Security and his GM pension, is among millions of Americans who could re-enter the U.S. They don’t show up in the U.S.

Fewer U.S. homeowners are falling behind on their mortgage payments, a trend that has reduced the late-payment rate on home loans to the lowest level in six years, according to credit reporting agency …