This post first appeared on August 24, 2007 This credit contraction is still young, yet we already have the spectacle of a full blown seize up in the money markets which has central bankers flummoxed. Normally, you expect this sort of panic after a few major financial train wrecks and weakness in the real economy. […]
Read more...Even though 2010 is proving to be a much happier year than 2009 for carriers and ports, weak consumer sentiment and rising odds of further deterioration in the economy has the operators of the big West Coast ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach, worried that a solid July will not prove to be a precursor […]
Read more...An article at Caixin helps clear up a mystery that has plagued Western observers, including some readers of this blog: where is all the money that is stoking Chinese real estate speculation coming from? Accounts of individuals buying 3 or 5 apartments at prices way out of line with incomes with little in the way […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they […]
Read more...The Fed seems to be exhibiting a pretty bad case of “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” syndrome, particularly when it has (or perhaps more accurately, had) other tools at its disposal. In case you somehow missed it, global markets got a bad case of deflation heebie jeebies […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The record $6 billion profit that the Commonwealth Bank is expected to announce today is a sign of an economy that has been taken over by […]
Read more...The latest stunt from the Obama Administration on the housing front is a peculiar bit of theatrics at the margin. As Bloomberg reports: The Obama administration will offer $1 billion in zero-interest loans to help homeowners who’ve lost income avoid foreclosure as part of $3 billion in additional aid targeting economically distressed areas. The Department […]
Read more...If all politicians were this entertaining, the public might start sitting up and taking notice of what happens in DC.
Read more...Bloomberg tells us: The Federal Reserve’s decision to buy Treasuries and keep interest rates low will support “risk assets” without bringing down unemployment, said Anthony Crescenzi at Pacific Investment Management Co. “Low volatility tends to be good for the interest-rate climate,” said Crescenzi, who is based in Newport Beach, California at Pimco, manager of the […]
Read more...Economists have been rewarded all too well for fetishing numbers and mathematics. The self-conscious effort within the discipline to turn it into a science (a goal most real scientists would deem to be impossible, given the fickle nature of human behavior), which meant making it more mathematical, has resulted in economists being better paid than […]
Read more...Some Fedwatchers were proven incorrect when the Fed inched towards a renewal of QE today by stepping up to buy Treasuries to offset shrinkage of its balance sheet due to principal runoff on the MBS it bought last year. The staff apparently favors renewed QE, due to the signs of faltering economic activity; the Board, […]
Read more...By Jack Sparrow, who writes at Mercenary Trader The employment picture constitutes yet another headwind and a significant one to the already-faltering U.S. recovery. It will undermine future spending, company earnings and profitability. Indeed, the poorer the employment picture, the greater the likelihood that households will become more cautious and that the corporate sector will […]
Read more...In the 1980s, when unemployment hit 8%, Ronald Reagan’s administration was concerned and took steps to address the problem. One of the causes had been the 60% increase in the dollar versus the yen, which allowed the Japanese to make deep inroads into the US. One of the responses was the so-called Plaza Accord, in […]
Read more...I generally refrain from reproducing significant parts of another commentator’s work, but a Paul Krugman post debunking the depiction of state and municipal employees as welfare queens merits more attention than a mere link. Krugman points to a paper by Jonathan Schmidt, who has parsed the data on private v. public sector worker pay level, […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal seems truly mystified that with headline unemployment at 9.5% and U6 at 16.5%, some employers are nevetheless having trouble filling jobs. But this shouldn’t seem all that strange when you consider that workers are not an undifferentiated mass, but have particular skills and experience, and live in particular places, and they […]
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