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By Jeff Harding Here’s the latest data on the economy: Personal consumption [consumer spending] in March fell at a seasonally adjusted rate of 0.2% compared to the month before, the Commerce Department said Thursday. It was the fourth decline in six months. Spending increased a revised 0.4% in February; originally, spending was seen up [...] Veronique de Rugy of the Reason Foundation on the economics of her native land, France. By Jeff Harding The First Quarter GDP numbers just came out: down 6.1% on top of a 6.3% decline in Fourth Quarter 2008. Click to enlarge This was greater than was expected: Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires expected a 4.6% drop in GDP during the first three months of 2009. With a 0.5% drop in the [...] By Jeff Harding I get market reports from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Before the crash their economists believed the housing boom would last forever. During the crash they acted as if it were a temporary anomaly. Recently they’ve been saying that recovery of the housing market [...] By Jeff Harding Now this is very interesting. On Monday, Chrysler reached a deal with the UAW. Under the terms of a summary agreement viewed by The Wall Street Journal, the UAW would take a 55% stake in the planned Fiat-Chrysler partnership in exchange for allowing Chrysler to reduce its cash payments to the [...] By Jeff Harding I think I got my last issue of Portfolio magazine. Conde Nast just announced that they are closing down the magazine. It was a slick magazine that had one good article and a lot of gossipy business articles on well known CEOs. The writing was out of the New Yorker [...] By Jeff Harding A long, long time ago there was a wheat farmer named Jeff, and after harvest he had 100 sacks of grain left over after he figured what he would need to live on until the next harvest. Jeff wanted to get one of those newfangled plowshares with a bronze [...] By Jeff Harding I am holding in my ink-stained hands a Zimbabwean $100 trillion banknote (100,000,000,000,000, or 1014), the largest ever denomination banknote with the zeros printed out. The largest denomination ever was the 1946 100 quadrillion pengo from Hungary (100,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 1020). My Zimbabwean note cost [...] By Jeff Harding President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that aggressive efforts to boost the US economy were beginning to bear fruit, even though the recession would cause more pain this year. Also on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke provided some hope that recession may be losing its momentum, when he said [...] By Jeff Harding General Motors Corp. doesn’t plan to make a $1 billion payment due June 1 to bondholders since by that point it expects either to have cut its debt through an exchange for shares, or to have decided to seek bankruptcy-court protection, GM Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said. Mr. Young, speaking to reporters on the [...] By Jeff Harding The Economic Czars in the Obama Administration are dictating to credit card companies what and how to charge their delinquent customers. The Wall Street Journal reported: In a bid to aid consumers hit hard by the recession, lawmakers are pushing legislation this week that would ban a long list of credit-card practices that essentially [...] By Jeff Harding Do you think a national sales tax is so far-fetched? We originally wrote about the possibility of a national sales tax in March, 2009. President Obama appointed Paul Volker to head up a new task group to study tax reform. The problem they are studying is not to figure out how to [...] By Jeff Harding The Fortune 500 list just came out and the headline is: 2008 was the worst year in the history of the Fortune 500 for America’s largest companies. From $645 billion in profits in 2007, profits dropped this year to just $98.9 billion – an 84.7 percent decline! Records were broken: Eleven of the top 25 largest [...] By Jeff Harding Robert Reich’s Tax Day article was, “A Short Citizen’s Guide to Kooks, Demagogues, and Right-Wingers on Tax Day.” I’ve said before that sometimes I think Reich and Paul Krugman are gifts from the gods to me because they are so easy to pick off. At first I had some confusion about the title of [...] By Jeff Harding The Tax Foundation announced that today is Tax Freedom Day. By that they mean we’ve worked for the federal government up to this day, and after today the money we earn is ours. Unless, like me, you live in California when it won’t come until April 20. It came 8 [...] By Jeff Harding Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote this piece in the Financial Times about Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (Hat tip to Bill D.): JH: I love Taleb’s philosophical approach to economics and investing and I am an advocate of his theories about risk and “Black Swans.” Sometimes I agree [...] By Jeff Harding I couldn’t let the story of Sun Wenguang pass by even though it doesn’t exactly fit into The Daily Capitalist’s general theme. Mr. Sun is a well known advocate for political freedom in the Peoples Republic of China who had the guts to visit the cemetery where a famous figure from [...] By Jeff Harding Larry Summers worked for hedge fund D. E. Shaw for one day a week for a year and received $5,200,000. Assuming they gave him a couple weeks off, that’s 50 days of work. $104,000 per day is pretty good work if you can get it. He also made a lot of [...] By Jeff Harding I came across this story from the Naked Capitalism and Zero Hedge blogs about the sudden resignation of Charles Bowsher, the Chairman of the Office of Finance of the Federal Home Loan Bank system. This was reported in Bloomberg by Jonathan Weil who interviewed Bowsher. The FHLB [...] By Jeff Harding Would someone please explain to me why this isn’t Keynesian theory in actual practice? This is from The Onion. |
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