consumers

The following is a re-print of the latest monthly newsletter from Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners, published with the express permission of the author. Visit www.arpllp.com to learn more about Absolute Return Partners.  You…

I am not sure I buy Meredith Whitney's assertion that the government is “out of bullets” in its quest to prop up the economy. It’s a matter of political will more than anything else. Nevertheless, I do agree with her basic premise in the…

If you want to get a leading indicator of how retailers are doing, going online is definitely the best way to get up-to-the-minute data. Not only is the data coming out of online retailers much more real-time, there has also been a huge…

Unemployment claims dropped dramatically to 466,000 this past week. This is the best data on the unemployment front we have seen in a long time. The prior week’s claims were also downwardly revised for the first time in a while. These…

Valero Energy has just announced it is shutting down its Delaware City Refinery.  This is a major news announcement because refiners should be seen as a canary in the coalmine for end-user demand and Valero is one company in the oil…

From Bloomberg: Confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly dropped in November as the loss of jobs threatened to undermine the biggest part of the economy. The Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary sentiment index decreased…

You have probably heard the term money illusion.  I want to coin a related new term called unemployment rate illusion because I think it is significant in light of some of the things David Rosenberg said earlier today about the…

I have just taken a look at the consumer credit figures for September, released just yesterday by the Federal Reserve. The data do show some modest deleveraging, especially when looking at the recent increase in nominal GDP. However, it is…

Several notable economists prognosticated on what Japan should do to get out of their malaise in the 1990s but none of them understood the problem or the options available to the sovereign government. They all gave poor advice. The way…

The data released this morning by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on personal income somehow managed to show weakness in income and consumption as well as savings.  I see this as proof that Americans are…