We comment only intermittently on the oil scene (there are only so many hours in the day), but the health and remaining productive capacity of the world’s major oil fields is a vital economic and strategic issue. Yet the big producers provide little information, so experts try to extrapolate from the data points they possess. […]
Read more...The Financial Times on Monday had two stories on inflation, one a lengthy story, the other a a comment, “The problem with inflation indices,” by Gideon Munchau, triggered by the fact that the Bank of England missed its inflation targets of 2% by over a percentage point (their Consumer Price Index increased at an annualized […]
Read more...Many consumers can’t afford to trade up to new cars. The years and years of Detroit providing heavy financial subsidies has stopped creating incremental sales. And Ford called its sales in April “terrible.” With that as a starting point, how far down can things go? One reason I imagine this is underreported is New York, […]
Read more...It was obvious that lenders were going to become more stringent, in a classic knee-jerk fashion, and now it is happening. From Calculated Risk:From O.C. Register: LendingTree lays off 20% of 2,200 workers LendingTree … laid off 20 percent of its 2,200 workers nationwide today, the company said. Rebecca Anderson, a spokeswoman for the company […]
Read more...I am loath to seem overly dependent on one source, but the market’s drop today was so overdue that it didn’t strike me as news, and the rest of the news didn’t seem that juicy either (how long can Wolfowitz keep going? In his next incarnation he can be an EverReady ad). So Ritholtz’s fulminating […]
Read more...We had mentioned the possibility of a downward revision of the first quarter GDP release in an earlier post; Roubini says first quarter GDP is likely to be revised downward to 0.7% (JP Morgan now forecasts 0.8%). He thinks the trajectory will worsen this quarter: Based on a variety of data that have come out […]
Read more...That’s the bottom line of a smart and scary bit of analysis by Michael Shedlock of “Mish’s Global Trend Analysis.” And it confirms, even more dramatically than we imagined, the large and growing gap between the Fed’s reputation and its real power. The Fed is a close cousin to the Wizard of Oz. It hides […]
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 […]
Read more...Recently, several well regarded skeptical-to-bearish market mavens (Jeremy Grantham, Barry Ritholtz, and Dennis Gartman) have independently come to the same point of view, namely that the stock market has become disconnected from reality and is trading on momentum, and the trend will accelerate. A quote from Ritholtz’s post “Buying Panic” was widely cited: In a […]
Read more...Many economists have observed that the current global imbalances, meaning US trade deficits financed by overseas capital flows, cannot continue forever. Indeed, there are already signs that foreign central banks are getting uncomfortable with their level of US dollar holdings and have said they plan to diversify their currency holdings (translation: sell dollars) which would […]
Read more...Michael Shedlock has a post, “Real World vs. Financial World,” which has a lot of interesting charts, which in his view pointed to an upcoming recession. The ones that interested me in particular related to money supply. As readers may know, money supply has fallen out of favor (the Fed prefers inflation targeting these days), […]
Read more...The third installment of this year’s series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is out, this one focusing on the level of corrective measures needed to counteract climate change and their likely cost. As we reported earlier (“Third IPCC Report: Compromised on Arrival“), each successive report is more and more politicized. This […]
Read more...According Robert Cringely at PBS, IBM is cutting at least 150,000 US jobs in its Global Services Division, and each US worker is to be replaced by a new overseas hire. This headcount cut, called Project Lean, bears out the populist view that corporate executives are greedy and outsourcing damages the American economy. As we […]
Read more...For those of you who were market watchers in the 1990s, Goldman Sachs’ investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen always made to case to buy stocks. She was so well regarded that a bullish pronouncement would move the market. And since the market for the most part appreciated handsomely, she looked brilliant, until, of course, she […]
Read more...One of the odd things about this bull market is the press fixation on the rather dubious bull case (not that the market won’t continue to be peppy for a while, but with fundamentals like the ones we have now, it can’t continue for long). We’ve pointed before to an excellent Martin Wolf comment on […]
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