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Comments on President Obama’s State of the Union Speech
I will say that President Obama is pretty good at this speech stuff. Remember last year when Professor Obama said that the adults are now in charge and we’re going to clean up the mess the kids made? This year had a much different tone. At [...] By Jeff Harding. As my readers know, every so often I get fed up with what comes out of Washington (Our Nation’s Capital) and feel the need to vent. My recent irritation is a letter Christina Romer, the president of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, published in the Wall Street Journal. The letter is an apologia for the economic policies [...] By Jeff Harding. The Commerce Department announced Thursday that GDP grew 3.5% in Q3 2009. This is the “Third Quarter Bump” I had been expecting. Economists and the news media are jumping on the “It’s Over!” bandwagon. Their conclusion is based on the premise that government spending (“stimulus”) will actually create real economic growth. It won’t and never [...] Japan vs. U.S.: Compare and Contrast By Jeff Harding. Japan has been in decline, or at least stagnation, for 19 years. Their GDP has not grown, unless you consider 0.6% (avg.) robust annual growth. They have experienced a deflationary economy, and now, it’s happening once again. They now [...] By Jeff Harding I have long stated that this economic crisis is the biggest the world has ever seen, including the 1930s. I say that because this crisis has penetrated every corner of the globe. US bankers weren’t the only ones securitizing debt at a record pace: many other countries adopted these innovative [...] 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 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 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 new unemployment numbers came out today and they were significantly below what most economists had been expecting: 345,000 versus an estimate of 520,000. Pretty good news. The downside is that the overall unemployment rate is up to 9.4% from last month’s 8.9%. This is the 17th straight month of rising unemployment since [...] David Rosenberg, formerly Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch, and now with investment manager Gluskin Sheff, talks about whether or not the recession is over. Rosenberg called the economic crisis correctly. VIdeo Interview By Jeff Harding Here’s the quote from the Wall Street Journal: The U.S. unemployment rate in April hit 8.9%, its highest in a quarter century, the Labor Department said Friday. But the pace of job losses slowed, in new evidence the economy was no longer deteriorating as quickly as it was earlier this year. The [...] In January I published How Long Will It Last, v.1.0 and discussed some new research on the results of studies of past depressions. You may wish to review that article. Professors Rogoff and Reinhart show that the historical average of banking crises have the following characteristics: Housing prices declined an average of 35% over six years; Equity [...] Declining Housing Inventory May Mean Something One of the keys to recovery will be a stabilization of housing prices evidenced by a reduction in the supply of homes for sale. There are many elements to this recession but [...] |
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