Daily

The big headline today is still JPMorgan Chase and it's huge trading losses. Clearly this is a black eye for JPM but the question goes to what longer term consequences the incident will have.

In the links today are a lot of links in both English and Spanish about the bailout of Spain's fourth largest bank Bankia. With the partial nationalisation, Spain is moving one step closer to Ireland in committing the sovereign government…

There has been a lot of back and forth by academic economists on monetary policy. The reason is two-fold. First, during the so-called Great Moderation many economists increasingly looked to monetary over fiscal policy for countercyclical…

The set up for having temporary tax and stimulus measures expire risks a new recession and such a downturn would be ugly, especially given the elevated level of US S&P earnings expectations and the relative P/E ratio of the US market

I wrote you last week after the third consecutive elevated jobless claims report, saying this was a definite harbinger of a weak jobs report. This has proved true. While March's gain of 120,000 jobs was revised up to 154,000 and…

Samsung and Apple produced record profits this past quarter. meanwhile companies like Motorola, Nokia, HTC, and RIM are all losing money. It seems like a winner takes all paradigm is shaping up in the mobile space. But going forward, I…

I forgot to add the links to today's daily commentary. Here they are.

A slew of manufacturing data was released today in Asia and Europe to go along with the Manufacturing data we saw yesterday in the United States. The data show a divergence of economic fortunes that demonstrates the severity of Europe's…

The global growth slowdown began in the second half of 2011. I flagged it as a trend last May. When I updated my view in December, my concerns were Europe, China, India and Australia. And this is still the case.

The news from Spain's statistical agency INE is that the Spanish economy shrank 0.3% in the first quarter of 2011. Spain thus joins ten other Western European economies in recession. None of this should come as a surprise. Given the policy…