|
By Jeff Harding The Case-Shiller 20 cities index showed home prices in April fell on a seasonally adjusted basis about 0.9%, or at a rate of about 10% per year. There has been an 18% decrease in home prices for 2009, and the decline is about 33% since the peak in 2006. This is [...] By Jeff Harding Well, you already know this because you are a dedicated reader of The Daily Capitalist. I have been drumming this riff for quite a while now: recovery won’t begin until housing prices stop falling. Now David Wessel, chief economics correspondent for the Wall Street Journal agrees. You read it here first. By Jeff Harding Manuel Zelaya and Hugo Chavez Leftists around the planet are condemning the Honduran army for ousting President Manuel Zelaya in a coup. Our own country sided with the Latin leftists in their condemnation. Hugo Chavez threatens to restore Zelaya to power. Is democracy threatened? Should he have remained in power? I would [...] By Jeff Harding It’s best to not mess with magic. Remember Disney’s Fantasia where Mickey Mouse plays the sorcerer’s apprentice? Mickey is given the chore to wash the castle floor but sneaks a peek at the sorcerer’s great book of magic and casts a spell on the broom which hauls buckets of water and swabs the [...] By Jeff Harding If one just read the headlines from today’s Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg.com, one would assume that the Obama Administration’s stimulus package is a resounding success. But a close review of the numbers reveals exactly the opposite. I talked about this on Wednesday in my article on Why the Fed [...] Interview of Nouriel Roubini. From Bloomberg. He’s always worth listening to. He has that fabulous Bela Lugosi accent. Caveat Emptor. There is a lot I don’t agree with here. I don’t think he gets the implications of increased savings, since he refers to the Keynesian “paradox of savings.” That is, increased savings means less consumer consumption [...] By Jeff Harding I just got this story off of the Mises blog and I thought I would add my own epitaph to the closing of the Hav-a-Tampa cigar factory in Tampa. They have been in business since 1901. 500 jobs are lost. The report from the Tampa Tribune says sales have been off because of anti-smoking [...] By Jeff Harding It’s not too difficult to understand why the Fed didn’t raise interest rates today. All you need to do is read the news; you’ll get the same information that the Fed gets only simpler and easier to understand. To put the issue in perspective, many critics are saying that the Fed needs [...] By Jeff Harding This article on the Great Depression was written in 1969 by Hans Sennholz, an Austrian theory scholar and professor. Ludwig von Mises had escaped the Nazis in Vienna and then in Switzerland to arrive in New York in 1940. Mises arrived with nothing, almost the last surviving scholar of the Austrian School. Sennholz was Mises’s first [...] By Jeff Harding Home Sales Existing-home sales rose a second month in a row during May, but prices again fell sharply, threatening a delay to a housing sector recovery. Home resales increased by 2.4% to a 4.77 million annual rate from 4.66 million in April, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday. The NAR [...] By Jeff Harding I am on my high horse right now. Refreshed after a week off I come back to an economic mess. And I’m angry. I like to think that I’m an optimist. That attitude has been difficult to maintain with the news out of Washington. Nouriel Roubini claims he’s not “Dr. Doom,” just a [...] Spoof on Ben Bernanke done to the Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” Very clever. Thanks to Bob Murphy at Free Advice. Apple Inc. said it sold more than a million units of its iPhone 3G S in the first three days, defying predictions that it wouldn’t reach the level of its predecessor’s launch. Apple also said Monday that six million customers downloaded its new iPhone 3.0 software in the first five days since its [...] By Jeff Harding There is a lot of interesting information this morning. I apologize for doing a bit of news “scraping” from other sites, but I’m still on holiday. There was a report from Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis who in turn was commenting on a report from Martin Weiss who publishes research at his Money and Markets [...] By Jeff Harding The numbers for inflation/deflation came out today. U.S. annual inflation slid deeper into negative territory in May as consumer prices posted their largest annual decline in almost 60 years. Still, a slight rise from the prior month and an increase in core prices that exclude food and energy support the growing sentiment at [...] By Jeff Harding Here is an article from the Wall Street Journal on Universa Investments, a hedge fund run by Mark Spitznagle who is a protege of Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame. I follow Taleb and his theories of risk investing closely and think he is a brilliant and original thinker. I listen carefully to [...] By Jeff Harding Another “you read it here first.” Senator John Warner criticized the Obama Administration’s grant of power to the Fed to regulate financial risk, saying that would put too much power in the hands of one institution. Instead he proposes a Systemic Risk Council to regulate economic risk: He proposed, based on consultation with outside experts, [...] Jeff Harding Friday’s Wall Street Journal’s Econ Blog reported on a speech Obama economic adviser Larry Summers gave to the Council on Foreign Relations. John Maynard Summers It was a very revealing speech: a detailed rationale for the Administration’s policies and actions. What is most revealing about it is that Summers’ view of economics and [...] I will be traveling for a while, so it may be more difficult for me to keep the daily onslaught of posts coming at you, but I will do my best. To make up the slack, I will be republishing really good articles by others writers I admire and read, that perhaps you have not [...] |
||
|
Copyright © 2010 The Daily Capitalist - All Rights Reserved |
||