The Economic news is mostly negative today with Consumer Confidence dropping below the consensus forecast. MGIC, the nation’s third largest mortgage insurer, posted a third quarter $518 million loss after a record number of homeowners […]
Read moreUnited States third quarter foreclosure rates rose substantially, 23 percent higher than last year, according to RealtyTrac Inc. Almost a million homes received a default, auction notice, or were repossessed by banks in 2009 quarter […]
Read moreBy my count, and I could be wrong, 36 Oregon economist signed a letter supporting the Legislature’s tax increases in response to the State’s budget problem. These are the key paragraphs: “ Cutting state spending […]
Read moreJoel Kotkin forwarded this article in the Oregon Environmental News. Seems that baby boomers will retire to rural communities in big numbers, for maybe 15 years. This is likely to be particularly important in Central […]
Read moreTim Herdt has a piece today on the politics of legalizing marijuana: “Forget Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. It says here that the most interesting political issue in California next […]
Read moreSo true: “Establishing financial stability—in addition to price stability and growth—is the essential role of the central bank. Achieving this goal in a way that avoids moral-hazard distortions, as with the too-big-to-fail finance institutions, and […]
Read moreDan started this, but he has some minor surgery today. Kirk and Bill finished it: CERF released its first United States and California forecast last week. The United States and California forecasts are pessimistic relative […]
Read moreI tweeted the title of this blog entry the other day and got a bit of pushback. My tweet was in response to this Yahoo! article. It seems that bank regulators want to control bank […]
Read moreToday’s Wall Street Journal has a piece by John Cogan, John Taylor and Volker Wieland. Cogan and Taylor are famous and respected economists. Volker is younger. He was Taylor’s student and at the Fed when […]
Read moreThe FED’s response to the last year’s financial collapse has drawn criticism from all fronts. We’ve contributed to the criticism in small ways. In particular, we don’t like the idea of too-big-to-fail and were unhappy […]
Read moreIn November of 2008, we substantially revised our forecast of mid-year 2009 United States year-on-year job growth rate from 0.3 to a fall of about four percent. At the time, we felt like we were […]
Read moreToday’s news will be dominated by the BLS’s unemployment data release. I’m sure we’ll have more to say on that. Right now, I’d like to discuss a less-publicized data release, one that probably has more […]
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