2008

It was nice to see a sub 500,000 jobless claims number to end the year after an ugly November and December. However, should note that the fine print is not as good because this number was completely dominated by seasonal adjustments. The…

Trolling the web today as is my wont, I happened across an interesting article about the Austrian finance company Immofinanz. It seems that Immofinanz got caught up in the Eastern European property market. Unfortunately, its investments…

It may sound counter-intuitive to loosen credit standards when we are on the cusp of major job losses and bankruptcies. But, this is exactly what the newly minted bank GMAC is going to do with its free money from the TARP (Troubled Asset…

The S&P/Case-Shiller Index for U.S. housing came out today. It was a pretty nasty little report. It showed a clear acceleration in home price declines for the month of October, the latest month for which data is available. In the…

In my most recent post, I gave a fairly comprehensive retrospective of the year that was. Near the end of that post, I listed a number of posts I wrote in Octobr and November which point to how I see 2009 shaping up. Let me give you a…

This is the time of year when everyone tends to look back and sum up the year in one way or another. I have been doing much of the same. In keeping with that theme, I have taken a good look through my nearly 1400 posts to get a better…

I want to make a brief statement about analysis, prognostications and this global recession. When I began this site nine months ago, my focus was clearly on the downside scenario. Now, while I did believe policy makers were underestimating…

On Wednesday morning the U.S. Department of Labor released the latest report on claims for unemployment insurance. The week to December 20th saw 586,000 new claims for unemployment insurance on a seasonally-adjusted basis, which is a…

Hello again. I hope you all had a good few days away. I will keep posting fairly light today as we have one day left until the weekend. This is a brief housekeeping post. I wanted to alert you to a number of changes we have made to the…