consumers

Upon first reading what I am pasting below, my thesis councillor briskly claimed that this particular piece of text represented a malignant tumor that had to be surgically removed if the patient (in this case, my master's thesis) were to…

From the Consumer Metrics Institute What credit numbers? During the past week there has been a flurry of Federal Reserve reports and commentary concerning the levels of credit in the current economy. The two most notable were: On July…

There is a good deal of speculation in the press at the moment over the tricky issue of whether or not Poland will be able to comply with its agreed deficit-reduction deadline on the basis of the latest budget proposals announced by the…

I am on BNN in Canada today at 1215 ET to talk about matters financial. So as a lead-in to what I am going to say there, I wanted to write here about the retail sales numbers, earnings season and the economy. Retail sales were weak. The…

Peter Cecchini, chief strategist at BGC Financial, talks to Pimm Fox about the U.S. economy and consumer credit on Bloomberg Television's "Taking Stock." He says that the 122% percent household debt to GDP ratio is well above the…

Just three days after returning to Beijing from New York, I had to leave again, this time to a series of conferences in Torino, Italy, so it is hard to do much writing for my blog, especially since I won’t spend my free time in the hotel…

From ADP (pdf): Nonfarm private employment increased 13,000 from May to June 2010 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report®. The estimated change in employment from April to May 2010 was revised up…

Below is the weekly commentary from Comstock Partners. The softening in the economy that we have been looking for is now becoming a reality as a wide sampling of the latest monthly or weekly economic releases clearly indicates that a…

David Rosenberg is out with a good post that takes on the double dip theme that everyone is talking about.  As you would expect, he has a bearish spin. To the degree you want counterfactuals, I really like what Morgan Stanley has to…

I have been very hawkish on protectionist rhetoric in the past, going so far as to call it the major risk to continued economic growth. However, I was on BNN's Headline show at lunchtime yesterday with Stacy-Marie Ishmael of FT Alphaville.…