The FDIC’s quarterly banking report, QBR, came out yesterday. This report contains one of the CERF Indicators, which are a set of special economic indicators that we began tracking in the aftermath of the “Great Recession”. The CERF Indicator in the QBR report is net bank charge-offs. The other CERF Indicators are: the home ownership… Read more

Today’s BLS jobs-report indicates the economy added 243 thousand jobs in January, which was about 90 thousand jobs above the consensus forecast of 155 thousand. Our forecast was 150,000. This gain was accompanied by a fall in the unemployment rate from 8.5 percent in December to 8.3 percent in January. The job-gains were pretty broad… Read more

This morning’s much anticipated fourth quarter GDP release provides a preliminary estimate of real GDP growth of 2.8 percent. To be fair, perhaps the anticipation is experienced mostly by forecasting economists and financial market watchers. I am always particularly interested in fourth quarter as it closes out the year and in this case I forecasted… Read more

Today’s jobs report indicates our labor markets remain in the doldrums. The unemployment rate fell slightly from 9.2 percent in September to 9.1 percent in October, but jobs increased by only 80,000. The 80 thousand job gain was the result of private gains of 104 thousand that were offset by government sector losses of 24… Read more

The initial estimate of United States third quarter GDP was released today. The economy grew at 2.5 percent, driven mostly by consumption growth of 2.4 percent and investment in equipment & software of 17.4 percent. Growth was slightly augmented by investment in structures and the improvement in net exports. The government sector’s impact on GDP was… Read more

Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims were awarded the Nobel Price in Economics today. When Robert Lucas won the Nobel Prize in 1995 I wondered if Professor Sargent and Professor Sims could win the prize. Certainly, their contributions were important. Professors Sargent and Sims, along with Professor Lucas, published in the Macroeconomics field, an area I… Read more

Previously published September 28 in the “California Economic Forecast”: The saga of the Great Recession continues. Over six million people have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, and job growth may be slow enough in the next few months that the unemployment rate rises again. Major revisions to GDP, released in late July, show… Read more

Interest rate spreads are returning to higher levels, levels that indicate financial and economic instability. This could indicate that an economic regime shift may occur this year. The normalized TED, which is the 3 month LIBOR minus the 3-month Treasury divided by the 3-month Treasury, has reached a level not seen since the fall of 2008.… Read more

Jeff Speakes Volatility in financial markets has jumped sharply in recent weeks, thanks to the U.S. debt ceiling debate and ongoing financial crisis in Europe. For most investors this has been a period of great consternation. But for some “Black Swan” investors, it has been a period of extraordinarily positive return. A Bloomberg article1 notes… Read more

Jeffrey Speakes Downgrade On Friday, August 5 after the market close, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) announced a downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt from AAA to AA+. This announcement followed Congressional approval of a debt limit increase and ten year plan to cut projected deficit relative to baseline by $2.1 trillion. Evidently, the debt deal was… Read more