Economic Data

Last year, I started my weekly newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give you a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occuring that I believed had a fifty percent or better chance of…

Let's talk about deficits for a second. The term deficit has some pretty serious negative connotations. So when we use that word, usually the implication is that the deficit is bad. Here's the thing though; as I have written here a number…

As the New Year begins, there are four events that are creating significant headwinds for the US economy. There has been a lot of talk about the fiscal cliff in the press but behind this is the debate over the US debt ceiling, which will be…

I have a panoply of links today. There is no one over-riding theme though I do want to address the Japan question in more depth at some point. I have seen some commentary from Kyle Bass and Jeffrey Gundlach on the dire straits Japan finds…

Quick post here. Apple's sales estimates were downgraded, as I posted yesterday. The reason for the downgrade was channel and supplier checks which revealed lower sales volume than initially believed. Apparently, Apple has told suppliers to…

According to Stan Collender, the chance that the US goes over the fiscal cliff is now at least 75%. This rhymes with what I have been saying all along. I would put the number at 90%. The US will NOT get all of the line items to prevent the…

As you may know, I now use the sectoral balances approach very heavily in looking at economic forecasting. The crux of the sectoral balances is that, from an accounting perspective, every sector's deficit must be offset by an equal surplus…

Business Insider met with Goldman's Chief Economist Jan Hatzius and learned he is bullish on the US economy largely because he believes his Wynne Godley-inspired model of the US economy shows likely releveraging in the household sector. …

According to recent estimates by Goldman Sachs, the US economy is already at stall speed, with GDP growth for Q4 expected to be an anemic 1%. Any further cuts to growth beyond this due to the fiscal cliff in 2013 would cause a recession.…

By Sober Look As discussed earlier (see post), US manufacturing data for November shows shrinking inventories. This is true for both the ISM survey ... ISM Inventories index (source: ISM) as well as the Markit PMI index: US Markit…