Even the relentlessly upbeat National Association of Realtors is predicting that 2007 will be the first year since the Great Depression to witness a decline in housing prices. With lackluster-to-bad real estate tidings a daily staple, the Associated Press tells us, in “Housing sales may be worse than data show,” that even that information is […]
Read more...This bombshell came courtesy Michael Shedlock, in “Fitch Discloses Fatally Flawed Rating Model“: What follows are excerpts from Absence of Fear, an excellent article written by Robert L. Rodriguez at First Pacific Advisors.We were on the March 22 call with Fitch regarding the sub-prime securitization market’s difficulties. In their talk, they were highly confident regarding […]
Read more...I will let you in on a dirty secret. Appearances to the contrary, this blog isn’t about finance and markets. Its real purpose is to encourage critical thinking, but since I know a wee bit about the financial services industry, I tend to use that as the point of departure. In that vein, it’s important […]
Read more...From the Wall Street Journal: Standard & Poor’s lowered ratings on 498 bonds backed by subprime home loans, comprising the vast majority of the 612 bonds that it earlier this week said it was reviewing for downgrades. The ratings company also said the 612 bonds were originally worth $7.35 billion, not the $12 billion it […]
Read more...That’s the question from Felix Salmon, and like Diogenes looking for an honest man, so far he hasn’t found anyone who has an answer. Salmon is getting close to the dirty secret: no one has an answer. The most they have are some interesting datapoints, factoids, and analyses. At the risk of having someone prove […]
Read more...I find it interesting when factoids that are already in the public domain get treated as if they are news. Stephanie Pomboy, as reported by Barron’s Alan Abelson (hat tip Barry Ritholtz) tells us that there are a lot of adjustable rate mortgages that have no equity. And, of course, if housing prices fall, more […]
Read more...The May retail sales reports, which showed the biggest gain in over a year, was generally greeted by investors as a sign of economic resilience. However, the skeptical sorts, looking at overextended consumers, lousy first quarter GDP stats, not particularly strong (and dubious) job growth reports, argued that if you looked at April and May […]
Read more...A neat little analysis by Ross Eisenbrey at the Economic Policy Institute may be difficult for union foes to explain away. It shows the proportion of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements in major European countries and the US and then shows productivity growth country by country in the same group 1979-2005. Despite being the […]
Read more...Edward Charles Ponzi Jr. occasionally comments at Angry Bear, and a recent submission became a post of its own. Ponzi makes several observations: what we have counted as growth (as in GDP growth) may be largely inflation (that statement is more accurate than you might think after you back out hedonic adjustments); that a lot […]
Read more...The government that told us that there were WMD in Iraq has also told us that payrolls increased by 157,000 in May. We’ve pointed out before that the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s monthly job report has a well established history of being unreliable and overstated. The Business Employment Dynamics report, which is far more detailed […]
Read more...Barry Ritholtz via Seeking Alpha gives yet another example of a disheartening trend, namely, that government-issued statistics that investors, economists, and businesses for analytical and planning purposes are increasingly dubious. The case in point is the employment statistics. While the widely cited Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly employment report has showed tepid to reasonable employment […]
Read more...I am beginning to wonder whether there is a single statistic related to the state of the economy that can be trusted. The latest data point to bite the dust is the widely-quoted factoid that 13% of subprime mortgages are in default. Turns out not only is this number wrong, but the methodology used to […]
Read more...One of Barry Rithotlz’s themes has been the idea of “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning the BLS’s predilection to define core inflation in such a way so as to exclude any item, like energy, whose price just might happen to be going up. We’ve noted a more general decline in the accuracy of government-generated economic statistics, particularly […]
Read more...It’s quite remarkable how indifferent to bad economic data keeps coming in and the markets keep shrugging it off. And what is of particular concern, if you are the worrying sort, isn’t the peppy equity markets (that’s for the optimistic types anyhow), but the near-total indifference to risk in the credit markets. Aside from a […]
Read more...A few days ago, we used the patently manipulated April nonfarm employment report as the point of departure for a post complaining more generally about the increasing dubiousness of government-produced statistics. Barry Ritholtz, who was also on this story early, gives a recap of the various other analysts who have looked at the report and […]
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