Economy

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…

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…

Nils Pratley’s piece at the Guardian on RBS and Lloyds is very good.  Two quotes sum up the situation quite well. First,regarding Lloyds, Pratley says: Royal Bank of Scotland's shares down almost 20% in two days; Lloyds's shares…

Marshall Auerback here. You saw Ed’s last post on China, quoting from Peter Tasker, one of the top analysts in Japan when I lived there. I take Peter’s insights very seriously. His analysis implies something a lot moreregarding currencies,…

This article by Peter Tasker, a well-regarded financial analyst in Asia, comes via the Financial Times (hat tip Marshall). He sees an enormous bubble forming in China – and parallels to Japan circa 1987: Emerging markets, it seems, have…

Lloyds are looking to avoid the embrace of government by going to existing shareholders to raise capital and sidestep the draconian break-up solution foisted upon RBS by Neelie Kroes. According to Bloomberg, this is the largest rights issue…

If one wants to see what happens when you use stimulus to help keep zombie companies alive and to resist reform efforts, look no further than Japan.  For twenty years now, Japan has been dealing with the consequences of a burst asset…

At the weekend I wrote about Alistair Darling’s about-face on breaking up to big to fail financial institutions. Apparently, this was not a case of labour changing tack and finding regulatory religion, but rather of the European Union…