Economy

I thought I would flag this for paid members. The jobless claims data for the last week came out and it jumped fairly significantly from 375,000 to 399,000. It had been in the 375,000 range for a number of weeks prior.

We continue to witness remarkable developments in the intersection of the related fields of economics, finance, ethics, law, and regulation. Each of these five fields ignores a sixth related field – white-collar criminology. The six fields…

Better than expected reception to Spain and Italy’s debt auctions have spurred risk on; dollar softer. BoE, as expected, left policy unchanged, ECB expected to do the same; Japan’s current account shrinks. US advanced retail sales expected…

Quick, what country is the economic engine that will power world growth? If you answered "China," you're far from alone. But there's another country that deserves as much attention and better yet, is much friendlier to investment: India,…

Spain and Italy begin this year's funding operations with bond auctions tomorrow and Friday. Although the euro is bouncing along its recent trough against not only the dollar, but against many of the other major currencies as well, there…

While many will be initially surprised by the data, on reflection it makes intuitive sense. In crude terms, wealthier countries typically work smarter--more capital intensively--than poor countries, not longer.

Senior former regulators are willing to be quoted by name asserting that Obama’s (not Bush’s) financial regulatory leaders are blocking lawsuits against fraudulent financial elites and their anti-regulatory co-conspirators because they fear…

Mr. Obama’s Secretary Geithner went to Europe met with EU leaders to demand that Greece make the write-downs voluntary on the part of banks and creditors. He explained that U.S. banks had bet that Greece would not default – and their net…

The eurozone is in a recession right now. And it is the banking sector where downside risk lies. Will the US also double dip? What about China's faltering housing and stock markets?

While Germany has done well of late, it was crushed by the downturn in 2008 and has an economy highly levered to external macro shocks since exports is a very large percentage of German GDP. German macro economists are forecasting recession…