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By Jeff Harding It isn’t as if taking your money and giving it to other people to buy new cars doesn’t create sales, it obviously did and I would expect that we’ll see an upward tick in GDP for Q3 as a result. Almost every investment house is revising upward their predictions on Q3 results. The Wall [...] By Jeff Harding The process of a credit cycle runs from boom to bust. We all fairly well understand the boom, but we, those not having gone through the Great Depression, have not experienced a true deflation. The process of deflation involves the inevitable result of every boom. In our situation we are seeing the result [...] By Jeff Harding: I saw this article in Bloomberg about the potential new Minister of Finance, Hermann Otto Solms, a.k.a. Hermann Otto Prince zu Solms-Hohensolms-Lich. The September 27 elections are expected to result in Solm’s party, the Free Democratic Party to win enough seats to become a coalition partner with Angela Merkel’s [...] By Jeff Harding This piece from Reason sums up my feelings on the legacy of Ted Kennedy. In one sense it is the end of the Kennedys as a political force in America. There still a few nephews and nieces active in politics, but they don’t carry the political charisma of their fathers. The spectacle of [...] By Jeff Harding President Obama did what was expected of him, the safe political thing: “Ben approached a financial system on the verge of collapse with calm and wisdom, with bold action and out-of-the-box thinking that has helped put the brakes on our economic free fall,” Mr. Obama said, with the Fed chairman standing [...] By Jeff Harding Good news is breaking out all over it seems. The housing market is finding a bottom and in some key markets prices are rising. The Case-Shiller report, the National Association of Realtor’s median price report, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) price indexes all report gains in sales and home [...] By Jeff Harding. The first auction of T-bills went off without a hitch as the Treasury sold $61 billion in three and six month bills. And, miraculously, in spite of all the debt they need to finance, the interest rate they had to pay went down slightly. But, as usual they gamed the market by buying [...] By Jeff Harding Here’s the schedule for this week’s Treasury auctions:
$31 Billion in 13 Week Bills, August 24 $30 Billion in 26 Week Bills, August 24 $27 Billion in 52 Week Bills, August 25 $42 Billion in 2 Year Notes, August 25 $39 Billion in 5 Year Notes, August 26 $28 Billion in 7 Year Notes, August 27 This will be interesting. $197 [...] By Jeff Harding
There was an article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that made me sigh. Or did it make me wince. I can’t remember. The title was “Reluctant Shoppers Hold Back Recovery.” I knew from the title that the entire premise of the article was wrong. Before I get into my thoughts on this, [...] By Jeff Harding At times I tend to be myopic in my view of economic data, focusing heavily on the U.S. But the crisis, as I have said, is international which ranks it right up there, well actually just below, the Great Depression. While our unemployment hasn’t reached depression levels (15% to 25%), the crash has [...] By Jeff Harding I thought this image was pretty cool. Hat tip to No. 1 Son.
By Jeff Harding I loved this article by Bloomberg’s Matthew Lynn about deflation. It doesn’t get into the causes of deflation or inflation, but it goes into the economic impacts of deflation. It’s a trade off in that savers and consumers are benefited and debtors are punished. With inflation, it is the opposite. The [...] By Jeff Harding Japan has the world’s second largest economy so we need to pay careful attention to what they are doing. The Q2 numbers just came out and real gross domestic product grew 0.9%, an annual pace of expansion of 3.7%. There are many commentators and economist already calling Japan’s recession at [...] By Jeff Harding One of the first major influences on me as a semi-educated young man was Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. Published in 1962, it was a powerful statement for free markets and personal freedom. The book smashed commonly held beliefs that capitalism was an evil force that served to keep people poor and oppressed. Point by point [...] By Jeff Harding France and Germany seem to be coming out of their recession as they both posted GDP gains: France by 1.3% and Germany by 1.4%. Of course these data may be suspicious but for the moment they appear to accurate. Let me take you back to March of 2009 and the G20 conference when [...] By Jeff Harding I think you will find Nouriel Roubini’s latest view on the economy interesting. Yes, he is another economist, Dr. Party Boy but at least he can claim to have seen our Crash coming. This is from Forbes. I didn’t include his picture in this piece because, well, he looks so serious. Which is quite [...] By Jeff Harding Professional economists are really confused by the recent data. As I have noted, what professional economists do is make a forecast by taking a statistic and run a trend line based on it. They take data from the US government (Departments of Commerce and Labor, Census, the Fed) as well [...] Fabulous interviews with Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame, and Dr. Doom himself, Nouriel Roubini. I will comment on this in a subsequent post, but Taleb’s view is fascinating and almost 100% correct. By Jeff Harding Following along with yesterday’s article, “Tell It Like It Is,” this morning’s headlines were: New York Times: Consumer Prices Hold Steady, Easing Inflation Fears Bloomberg: Consumer Confidence in U.S. Declines on Job Losses, Inflation Is Contained Same news, different emphasis. Are things getting better or worse? By Jeff Harding Why does it seem that every article from mainstream media seems to declare that the recession is over and that we’re on the road to recovery? I notice a trend in certain publications to trumpet the good news and downplay the bad. Forbes and the Wall Street Journal seem to [...] |
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