Economy

Given the fact that this site is called Credit Writedowns, you would expect me to take a fairly skeptical view about the growing consensus regarding a rapid recovery in 2009. I do, in large part because I understand that banks face many…

David Rosenberg has been one of the voices of reason warning of excesses during the recent boom and predicting the unraveling to which we are now witness.  I have quoted him liberally here.  There is a very good piece on Rosenberg in the…

The Institute for Supply Management released its monthly manufacturing survey for the Unite States today. The data show a fall from 36.2 to 32.4 where 50 represents the divide between recession and expansion. The 32.4 figure represented…

It was nice to see a sub 500,000 jobless claims number to end the year after an ugly November and December. However, should note that the fine print is not as good because this number was completely dominated by seasonal adjustments. The…

Trolling the web today as is my wont, I happened across an interesting article about the Austrian finance company Immofinanz. It seems that Immofinanz got caught up in the Eastern European property market. Unfortunately, its investments…

On Wednesday morning the U.S. Department of Labor released the latest report on claims for unemployment insurance. The week to December 20th saw 586,000 new claims for unemployment insurance on a seasonally-adjusted basis, which is a…

The punderati has been especially kind to China. As the global recession takes hold, the conventional wisdom has moved from the largely debunked de-coupling of China to a story where China slows, but much less so than the west. But is…

Below is an article that has been syndicated on a number of sites in the Indian press (hat tip Ravin) which challenges the common wisdom that Asia, and particularly China, will weather the downturn better than the U.S. While the articles…

It wasn't until I read about a massive writedown by a German bank associated with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers that I started to connect the dots. But, there is a hidden flaw in our accounting system which accounts for some of the…

The U.S. Department of Labor reported a fall from a revised 575,000 jobless claims don to a still very elevated 554,000 this past week. On the whole these numbers demonstrate that many jobs are being lost and that the December unemployment…