May 2011

This is good satire from Stephen Colbert. It reminds me a little of Conan, William Shatner and Sarah Palin doing their poetry readings in 2010.

Not raising the debt ceiling will not mean default, instead it will mean other federal spending will get cut

Typical street review of today’s numbers from Goldman. As suspected, look for continued downward revisions to initial 4% Q2 estimates. And note the graph below showing employment as a % of the population. The economy continues to be demand…

The relationship between oil and currencies is no more stable that the relationship between the S&P 500 and currencies. As we noted yesterday in our look at the correlation between a handful of currencies and the S&P 500, it is not…

Jim Chanos sees a slowdown in residential property sales coupled with declining prices. Real estate companies are starting to close down. He argued on CNBC yesterday that this means the first signs of a Chinese slowdown are showing. Video…

"I don't want to see unemployment this high," Thomas Hoenig says. "But I also don't want to see it this high three or four years from now following another crisis because we were so impatient. That's a very hard trade-off and it's very…

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (CPI) is probably the target of more anger than any government dataset. And certainly, it's not great at measuring inflation. But gauging inflation can be tricky; so today, I wanted to…

Greece and Ireland appear to have lost an important political ally with the sidelining of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as both plead for more financial assistance from European partners to avoid an early restructuring of debt. The key word is…

So, the data are weakening. What does that portend for the rest of the year? Lakshman Achuthan of the ECRI thinks it means a serious global slowdown. Below is a recent interview he did on Yahoo's Tech Ticker explaining why.

So, the Fed has basically just announced it will stop QE2. It will then start selling Treasuries. And remember, this is at the same time the Treasury is selling $10 billion a month in mortgage securities. Only after this will rates be…