2013

This morning, the Spanish government initiated its bond auction process this year. The auctions were a success with the yield on 10-year government bonds falling to 4.95%, below 5% for the first time since March 2012.

North America Letting the payroll tax cut expire was a terrible idea; extent of terribleness unclear | FT Alphaville "While workers intended to spend 10 to 18 percent of their tax-cut income, they reported actually spending 28 to 43…

In yesterday's links, I pointed to two links showing that Ireland had regained bond market access. Here is more evidence that Ireland is regaining bond market access.

Last year, I started my weekly newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give you a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occuring that I believed had a fifty percent or better chance of…

The Dutch-language press in Belgium is reporting that belgium experienced a 3.1% decline in apartment prices nationwide, largely because of weakness in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders.

Today the Wall Street Journal is reporting that German industrial output for the 4th quarter of 2012 likely fell below the output for the 3rd quarter, making it possible that Germany could lapse into recession.

My position since October 2009 has been that the United States could not hold off deficit hawks for more than three or four years. 2013 is the deadline for that prediction to be fulfilled and we are right on schedule with the fiscal cliff…

North America Consumers Take on More Debt - Real Time Economics - WSJ "U.S. consumers’ overall borrowing expanded in November at a quicker pace than the previous month, led by bank loans and student borrowing.The total outstanding dollar…

The unemployment rate in the euro zone hit 11.8% in November according to the numbers released by the EU this morning. That is a record. The EU-27-wide unemployment rate was 10.7%. This contrasts very unfavourably to the unemployment levels…

Australian property market is seeing transaction volume fall. Preliminary Melbourne sales data for 2012 from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria says that 69,000 home sales were registered last year. While that is a fall of only 3,000…