double dip

by Comstock Partners Last week, toward the end of our comment on consumer deleveraging, we mentioned that the year-over-year change in the ECRI Weekly Leading Indicator had strongly suggested the distinct possibility of recession. In…

John Hussman is not buying the recent risk-on sentiment that has developed since September began. For example, retail sales numbers are to be released tomorrow.  Marc Chandler has said that a number above consensus estimates of 0.3%…

By most estimates, the statistical recovery which began in the second half of 2009 in the US has been weak. Many had been talking about a V-shaped recovery early this year. However, given the magnitude of the imbalances in the U.S. leading…

Jobless claims have been quite elevated of late, averaging around 450-480,000 for the past few months. While these are worrying figures, they do not in and of themselves point to recession. In my last post I used a chart of the year-on-year…

by Comstock Partners For some time it has been our view that the recent recession, unlike all other post-war recessions, was caused by a credit crisis, and that it would therefore be followed by a series of weak recoveries and frequent…

I tend to put a lot of stock in jobless claims as a coincident (real-time) indicator of the economic scene. My reasoning here is fairly simple. Household spending makes up 70% of the economy. Households are dependent on labour wages for the…

My friend Rob Parenteau says "most professional investors are high frequency macro data and short run asset price driven."  He basically means they have no real macro analytical framework to use when making investment…

Perhaps it would be a good time for investors and analysts alike to lean back and have a good bottle of Pinot Noir and let markets be markets. Surely, with the likes of Hindenburg Omens still getting its share of the tape and with the macro…

By Annaly Capital Management Existing home sales can’t go to zero, can they? They clocked in at 3.83 million on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis in July, down 27% from the prior year, half of the 2005 peak of 7.25 million and the…

By John Lounsbury David Rosenberg, chief economist for Toronto's Gluskin Sheff, has a graph showing the history of the Philly Fed Business Outlook Survey.  I have added annotations below: Before this month and since 1968 there have…