Japan stepped up their purchases of United States Treasuries during October to $105 billion dollars, boosting their total holdings of United States Treasury Issues to $731 billion, more than 10 percent of the total market. […]
Read moreThe United States unemployment rate rose from 9.8 percent in September to 10.2 percent in October, exceeding our forecast and the consensus forecast. We appear to be in-between everyone else and reality again. The data, […]
Read moreThe Mysterious Effective Demand tweeted and blogged on a paper by University of Arizona Professor Brent T. White. I haven’t read the full paper, but the portion quoted by Effective Demand presents a pretty simple […]
Read moreCarry trade is the name of the strategy of going short in a low-interest rate currency such as the Japanese Yen or the U.S. dollar while going long in a high-interest rate currency such as […]
Read moreRecent United States economic indicators have provided mixed signals. Measures of GDP, industrial production, factory orders, and trade have been encouraging while homeownership rates, foreclosure rates, and bank charge-offs still remain discouragingly high. A manufacturing […]
Read moreI ran across the “Distress Index” today. It’s put out by the Foundation for Economic Education, an outfit I’ve never heard of before. They even have a nice chart showing how their index has performed […]
Read moreThe United States government reported that real Gross Domestic Product increased at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter. Improvements in Consumer Durables consumption, up 22.3 percent, and Residential Fixed […]
Read moreThis recession and its accompanying financial crises started with large financial institutions making headlines with bad loans, liquidity problems, and in many cases insolvency. The driving factors at that point were the toxic residential-real-estate-based securities […]
Read moreReuters has a release of new housing data. Seems sales fell in September and Augusts’ numbers were revised down. I’m amazed at the writer’s confidence that we are in “widening recovery.” The money quotes are […]
Read moreA couple of months ago, on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, I had the opportunity to sit next to an impressive young woman from New Zealand, and we had the type of […]
Read moreI was reviewing new data from DataQuick Information Systems. There were 111,689 California Notices of Default (NODs) during the third quarter. While this is down from 124,562 in the second quarter, it is still an […]
Read moreCalifornia’s jobs report, released Friday the 16th, showed that the California economy is still bumping along the bottom of a serious recession. The various indicators, for the month of September, show only slight improvements over […]
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