Economy

This past weekend, the FDIC closed yet another bank, Freedom Bank of Bradenton, Florida. The bank had total assets of $287 million and total deposits of $254 million. Super regional Fifth Third, based in Cincinnati, Ohio will take over…

This post is a guide to understanding the GDP deflator, which the government uses to arrive at the economic growth numbers we all hear on TV or read about in the newspaper. This post is the product of a lot of background research and…

No change. That's what we see from this week's jobless claims numbers. The 4-week average number is up 145,750 from a year ago. That's a bonus because three weeks ago this number was 166,500 and has fallen for three weeks on the trot.…

So the numbers are in and the U.S. economy shrank 0.3% n the third quarter. That is a low number, but it is better than expected. The U.S. economy looks like it is in recession based on these numbers. However, before we go away…

I won't be able to comment here until later today when I will update this post. But I wanted to report that U.S. GDP shrank 0.3% in Q3, less than the 0.5% median forecast. Now, when it comes to government statistics like GDP, the devil's…

As we head into the final stretch leading up to the U.S. presidential election, I wanted to throw a thought out there about experience and judgment. I have long been of the view that natural bias toward one or the other has a lot to do…

I have not posted all day because I have been spending most of the day doing site maintenance -- importing the data from the credit crisis timeline into a database, which will make it a lot easier to update, backfill and make changes to the…

Patrick Buchanan has given up on any chances of McCain winning this election judging by his last blog post. The title alone says it all. In a missive titled "Obama’s First 100 Days" Buchanan asks what an Obama Administration will look like.…

This week, I can practically repeat what I said last week verbatim - so, I will.Writedowns continued unabated despite the easing global credit markets. While we should see a bear market rally due to this easing, the ill effects of a global…

This is a quote from the populist American politician William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat famous at the beginning of the last century."There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the…