consumers

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona The current generation of policymakers seem to be like Captains of large ocean liners, out there on the high seas, bereft of either compass or adequate charts, trying hard to calm their worried passengers by…

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen was a German baron born in Bodenwerder in the eighteenth century. Made famous by the Hollywood director Terrence Gilliam, the baron first came to public…

By Michael Pettis On August 8 Credit Suisse published a study they had commissioned by Professor Wang Xiaolu of the China Reform Foundation.  A lot of readers have asked on- and offline me to discuss this study in light of the entry I…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). The incessant debate of whether the economy is inflating or deflating…

There has been a lot of excited press commentary recently about China’s overtaking Japan as the world’s second largest economy.  China’s GDP should be larger than Japan’s for the first time sometime this year, which in a similar…

By Comstock Partners We have maintained all along that the statistical economic recovery would lose momentum after the effects of the stimulus and inventory replenishment wore off, and the recent data are confirming our view. Moreover…

The market is engaged in a discussion over what the Federal Reserve will do next. St. Louis Fed president James Bullard published a provocative paper about ratcheting up quantitative easing to avoid the Japanese dilemma. Conversely, Philly…

Also see "Lawsuit Tackles Files That ‘Re-Spawn’ Tracking Cookies" and "The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets" at The Wall Street Journal.

From The Consumer Metrics Institute On July 30th the Bureau of Economic Analysis ('BEA') released its "advance" estimate of the annualized growth rate of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product ('GDP') during the 2nd quarter of 2010. Per…

Wow! We see the word "Deflation" everywhere; we see it in every financial publication and hear it every time we turn on financial TV. We see that the pundits who were bearish because of runaway inflation have just recently…