Ah, what cheery news this morning. Oil at a new high, producer price increases running twice as high as expectations, real estate repossessions running double the rate of last year. Yet the Dow is up a tad on the report that New York manufacturing increased. Pray tell what is New York manufacturing, besides the garment […]
Read more...Food shortages have gotten an uptick in press coverage in the last two days due to a G7 pronouncement that was curiously interpreted differently by the New York Times and the Financial Times. First, the NY Times: The world’s economic ministers declared on Sunday that shortages and skyrocketing prices for food posed a potentially greater […]
Read more...As told in the Financial Times, LBO groups interested in buying leveraged loans on offer from Citi are able to select the assets they want, rather than buy pieces of the package, as Citi had planned. I rarely take issue with the FT, but in this case, particularly in its choice of headline, the pink […]
Read more...From Elizabeth Warren at Credit Slips: Hanging the worldwide economic recovery on reigniting consumer spending is like investing in used fireworks. The rest of the post, “The Stimulus That Can’t Stimulate,” is good: How are Americans planning to spend their stimulus checks? According to a new poll, fully 41% say they will use their rebates […]
Read more...Wikipedia breeds ‘unwitting trust’ says IT professor ComputerWorld G7 Stance on the US Dollar: Talk is Cheap Nouriel Roubini The Best Hedge Fund Manager of All-Time 1440 Wall Street Traders should track their hormones John Coates Financial Times NPR Calls for Immediate Action to Increase Global Warming Dean Baker Retailing Chains Caught in a Wave […]
Read more...The US has had a free lunch for so long, thanks to the willingness of kindly savings rich foreigners to buy our Treasuries, that the realization that there are limits to what we can have, both individually and as a nation, is hard for many to accept. We managed to have guns and butter for […]
Read more...Gee, wonder why it took so long for someone to connect the dots. Scarce credit, high commodity prices, and a economy that’s weakening despite the Fed pulling out all stops do not bode well for corporate earnings. Yet consensus earnings forecasts predicted a rise in profit for the S&P 500 in 2007 and and an […]
Read more...While it isn’t clear whether homeowners with the ability to pay abandoning mortgages is as widespread a problem as the press would lead one to believe (Tanta at Calculated Risk has been skeptical), Freddie and Fannie appear to be taking no chances. The Chicago Tribune reports on measures taken by the two government sponsored enterprises […]
Read more...Before we get to the meat of this post, I hope readers will bear with me for another day or two. I’m regrouping after being out of town, and have a busy next couple of days. On top of that, my subscription to the WSJ online expired over the weekend, and I can’t renew on […]
Read more...Tim Duy, posting at Economist’s View, is disturbed that the Fed isn’t giving much weight to rising inflation in its monetary calculus. Duy, a Fedwatcher, more than once underestimated the central bank’s interest rate cuts because it was inconceivable to him that anyone who read the data could think that repeated aggressive cuts were warranted. […]
Read more...Henry Kaufman, former chief economist of Salomon Brothers in its heydey and a Wall Street eminence grise, joins the chorus of critics who said that the Fed’s failure to regulate got us into our economic mess. Note that Kaufman is not new to this theme, just more blunt, as a post from June of last […]
Read more...An article in Bloomberg notes that despite the dollar bounce against the euro (the move against the yen can be characterized as noise), the Group of Seven will probably need to take “concrete steps” to support the currency. And those aren’t coming any time soon. As the piece notes, the ECB is still concerned about […]
Read more...Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them Wired Flowers Losing Smell Live Science Central bank independence James Hamilton, Econbrowser. Hamilton argues that Congress, not the Fed, should determine how much fiscal risk the central bank assumes (I for one am still gobsmacked that the Joint Economic Committee hearings on the Bear bailout […]
Read more...Ann Pettifor argues in The Guardian’s Comment is Free discusses some misperceptions about our current economic crisis and argues that the wrong lessons are being drawn from 1929. She writes from a UK vantage but much of the discussion is relevant to the US: In debates about the financial crisis – on the left and […]
Read more...Our colleague Susan Webber reviewed Tim Harford’s latest book, The Logic of Life, in the current issue of the Conference Board Review. Harford also penned the bestseller The Underground Economist and writes regularly for Slate. Webber wasn’t terribly taken with it. While her entire article is worth reading, we thought this section stood out: Why […]
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