November 2009

While I see the job numbers as pretty much what was expected, the data do make clear that we are seeing a major jobless recovery. David Rosenberg has a piece out today that goes right to the heart of the issue: All we can say is that if…

David Michael Green: Can You Hear Us Now? We still want change. Hat tip Lavrenti. Marc Faber has short term concerns about commodities, says gold may drop to US$800 - Business Intelligence Middle East Is this rally over the top…

The Obama Administration is captured. To understand why it has acted as it has, one doesn’t have to take the view that its efforts to save the banking industry were a deliberate attempt to line bankers’ pockets by transferring money from…

The employment market is pretty grim. We’re talking a double digit unemployment rate – and that’s just the base rate. The comprehensive unemployment rate is now 17.5% in the US.  This is a fact not lost on our politicians. Today,…

Average weekly hours a record low of 33.0. Stock futures now down. The household survey says we have lost 1.3 million jobs in three months. 17.5% U-6 unemployment. Median duration of unemployment is now 18.7 weeks from 15.4 just 3 months…

I was reading Kid Dynamite's account of the recent Treasury - Finance Blogger meeting after having read a bunch of others (see them all in Abnormal Returns’ Nov 4th links). And I was struck by his characterization of the thinking at…

I have been reading press accounts of the GM decision to back out of the Opel/Vauxhall sale to the Magna/Sberbank consortium from various countries. There are a lot of different perspectives on this event in the U.S., Belgium, Spain,…

The Department of Labor data released this morning indicated that 512,000 people filed initial claims for unemployment insurance in the latest week.  This is down 20,000 from last week and marks the last data points we are to get on…

Be sure to see William Shatner’s poetic reading of Levi Johnston’s tweets below. Pretty funny. Buffett Revisits Hunting Ground for Survivors: Alice Schroeder - Bloomberg.com "Buffett isn’t as bullish as he sounds." Clever…

The Motorola Droid is the so-called iPhone killer. Is it the real deal?  Mossberg seems to think so. See also: Motorola's Droid Is Smart Success for Verizon Users – Walt Mossberg, WSJ