It’s odd the way the players pay attention to some numbers and not others. There’s no reason why the market should have been surprised by the ConCon. ABC News does a comprehensive consumer confidence survey weekly that always foreshadows the ConCon. Last Tuesday ABC had this to say:
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Please don’t take this prediction too seriously but I think the “Phrase of the Year” will be something like– “… is struggling to hedge its exposure” and hence the “Word of the Year” will be something like “hedging”. Of course it will be #1 only in the case the word “meltdown” does not beat it out.
Credit...
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by Jimi
Total eurodebacle is in the offing. It’s going to get very hot in Athens before long.
What struck me about the reporting on Greece today was that senior officials from Core-Europe said that Greece had not asked for financial assistance. They wanted to make clear that everyone heard the message – like here...
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“Fewer Americans than anticipated filed claims for unemployment insurance last week as an administrative backlog subsided and indicating companies are nearing the end of major staff cuts as the economy recovers. ” That’s how Bloomberg saw it today.
Rupert Murdoch’s Marketwatch put it this way- “First-time filings for state unemployment benefits dropped by their largest...
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The World is partying like it is 2007 all over again. The reasons are two: the crazy money printed by Helicopter Ben and the moral hazard produced by the universal bailout of everything, everywhere. I still see the traces of sanity in the US consumers’ minds as they are running a pretty decent savings rate but...
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All the other Government BS aside, the real unemployment rate, known as the U-6, which is the one that includes discouraged workers and those underemployed who could only get part time work, rose from 17.1% to 18% in January.
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By Heritage Ray
FDIC leases almost 151,000 square feet in Schaumburg
(Now here’s a growth business)
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has signed a short-term office lease for almost 151,000 square feet (more than half the building) in Schaumburg, Illinois to handle receiverships and asset sales for its growing roster of failed Midwestern banks.
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The spectacular rebound in oil prices in 2009 could be attributed to two major factors: fears of currency debasement that lead to excess hoarding and speculation; and discipline of well-oiled Opec members to cut production.
You already know from many publications that all tankers used to stockpile oil would form a line of 26 miles....
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Last year I was not making making predictions for 2009, mostly because my call for 2008 was ridiculously correct and I had nothing more to say. But this year will be different and I’ll try to make some predictions.
The most important point to stress for the coming year is that everything will depend on interest rates...
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The big financial question that every econo-blogger must be aware of is: how come that the proportion in profits in the economy as the whole that the financial industry was taking was constantly increasing all the past few decades and yet this same financial industry became the epicenter of the systemic crisis we are...
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The Wall Street media was in a frenzy over the “better than expected” news on retailing from the Commerce Department on Friday. It’s all a matter of perspective. Yes, the data was up strongly month to month, and yes, it was higher than last November when the economy seized up following the stock market...
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As almost all WSE authors posted their view on reverse REPO announcement, I think I have to post my take as well. Yes, in general I think it is a warning to some of the most leveraged carry-trade players. But my view is a small refinement in the same direction.
First, I think this is...
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As the internet is full of comments on the default of Dubai World corporation and the S&P futures are down by 22 points, I assume that you all already know what happened, so I’ll jump directly to the conclusions. Calling this post “The Lessons of Dubai” may sound a bit premature, because usually people...
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The government propaganda minions in the financial media have done it again this week, claiming that the flattening trend of new unemployment claims is a sign that the economy is improving. Are they too stupid or too clever to report the real reason that claims are coming down? That is that if millions fewer...
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The number of blogs commenting on dollar vs stocks inverse correlation is approaching infinitum. I won’t try to summarize what I found, I just want to place some accents.
First let me post the short-term correlation chart (source):
The correlation went positive after BS bailout last year, when everybody went optimistic that the worst is over....
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The reported rise in retail sales yesterday had the media had in a full throated bull chorale. Boomberg breathlessly screamed:
Gains in U.S. Retail Sales Ease Concern Recovery Will Cool!!! OhmyGOD!
U.S. Stocks Extend Global Rally on Retail Sales!!! BUY STOCKS NOW BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!!!
and Marketipwatch blared Bernanke Says There Will Be Growth in the...
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Lies Lies Lies
Boobberg- Fewer Americans than anticipated filed claims for jobless benefits last week, signaling the worst employment slump in the post-World War II era is easing as the economy expands.
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We all hear from all possible stock market advisers and economists that the market discounts all news in advance, essentially validating the tradition to call news “newsnoise”. And I totally agree with that. However I also hear as many times that the market discounts fundamentals well in advance. And here’s the problem. It turns out that...
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Several years ago, before it became fashionable I began reporting here on the real unemployment rate, what the government calls the U6, which includes discouraged workers and those employed part time who want full time work but can’t get it. Lately the mainstream media has begun to notice this number, and over the past...
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by Chicago Bear (Stool Pigeons Wire- 10/30/09) Here’s what they said in the GDP report:
The improvement in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected upturns in personal consumption, inventory investment, exports, and residential fixed investment and a smaller decrease in nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by rise in imports, a downturn...
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All you need to know about Program Trading but were always afraid to ask.
There is a lot of confusion on the internet about program trading and I have the impression that many people who seriously discuss it in fact are not directly involved in it. So what is program trading?
In the past, when you...
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The Senate Finance Committee has voted to kill the public option in the health care bill it is writing. At least if they ban insurance companies from rejecting people with “pre-existing conditions”, I and people like me who can afford coverage but can’t buy it, might have a shot at getting coverage. But how...
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Every time I hear about the Fed dual mandate I feel it’s part of some kind of “find hidden words” game. The real thing is not what they say
The dual mandate says “maintain price stability” and “empower the maximum employment”. Immediately confusing, because I see nothing dualistic here. It never happened in history of...
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I’m very confused. Usually the press is a big contrarian indicator. For example the euphoria about economy makes me think that the stock market is a toast. But the abundance of bearish materials on oil (like this one) is very confusing. It would suggest that oil should keep going higher.
But I don’t believe that....
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There are two stories that I’ve posted in my feed (the link at the navigation bar) – one is that China just made a bold statement about Ben printing money and another that monetary aggregates just turned into freefall mode (i.e. we are witnessing the start of the classic deflationary spiral).
What to make of...
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Paul Krugman had a lengthy piece in the Times over the weekend–something to the effect of what’s wrong with the economics profession. Having the attention span of a gnat, I could not even begin to read the whole thing, but I did manage to get through a couple of paragraphs when I got to...
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There were two pieces of economic data released today. The ADP unemployment data is a prelim to the weekly unemployment claims, and is a bit of a so what. So are factory orders, but let’s take a look at it see to see if there’s any evidence of green shoots, or the latest term...
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As the market just (most likely) formed an important intermediate top it is the good time to celebrate the end of this recession. The bear market rally always ends on perfect news. The end of the recession seems good enough to me to mark the top.
The article I’ve linked above is the perfect example...
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The FIM (Financial Infomercial Media) has gifted us with more nonsense today in the form of Pending Homes Sales data from the NAR (Realtors) and the Purchasing Managers Manufacturing Index from the ISM (Purchasing Managers).
Bloomberg was positively ecstatic about the housing data, proclaiming “The number of contracts to buy previously owned homes rose more...
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The editors of Forbes have asked me to give them my economic forecast for the next year (cough, cough, guffaw). Don’t be impressed. They sent the same email to the whole financial wackosphere. I assume that their purpose, as with the entire financial infomercial media, is to poke fun at us wackos so as...
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