2012

Just to put some meat on the bones around the cyclical downturn turning into recession, the personal income data paint a negative picture absent debt accumulation. What we see in recessions is that personal income leads the cycle and when…

Retail sales are at recessionary levels right now, having dropped for a third consecutive month. I need to flag the inventories data that came out this morning in the US as the only thing between us and outright recession.

The June retail sales report was simply dismal. Not only did sales decline by 0.5% in June rather than rise 0.2% as the consensus expected, but the April data were revised. The measure used for GDP calculations, excludes gasoline, auto…

Daily commentary Since I have a decent amount of links, I thought i would do a special Sunday daily commentary. The issue I wanted to highlight is credit and how it gets created. At some point I may make a longer version of this to flesh…

The FT has a great story on Amazon out today that is a must-read. It chronicles how deeply Amazon has become embedded in the architecture of the retail world in today's digital age. In the other bit of tech news that I thought noteworthy,…

Whatever can be said for and against Barclays and Bob Diamond, the story is in danger of exhausting itself at the wrong link in the chain. It has sidelined BubbleTV's around-the-clock coverage of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's dog walker has…

Moody's Investors Service has today downgraded Italy's government bond rating to Baa2 from A3. The outlook remains negative. Italy's Prime-2 short-term rating has not changed.

Most of the links are about Europe as usual but I think the breadth of news today is good. I would like to highlight the conflicting economy stories out there. While Europe remains mired in recession, the rest of the world is still…

The problem cannot simply be a problem of current account imbalances—we’ve got them all across the US states. And the US, itself, runs a chronic current account deficit. But the US federal government is sovereign, it issues its own…

Just when you think that things can get no worse in Spain, they do.