Economic Data

In the week just ended, the US Department of Labor is reporting the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims as 386,000. While this is a decrease of 2,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 388,000 it is well above the…

Quantitative easing hasn't worked to lower interest rates in the past but has caused a huge uproar from those opposed to the policy in the US. QE is therefore both ineffective and politically-charged. But a lot of people still expect it.

Steve Keen's talk at INET is now up on the web (hat tip BT). His talk is billed as a primer on Hyman Minsky. In it, Steve argues that one cannot model Minsky using a New Keynesian or traditional neoclassical approach because of the reliance…

China's Q1 GDP disappointed expectations and market rumors and is the chief driver of the capital markets today. The official measure of growth was 8.1%. The consensus was 8.4% before yesterday's rumors of a 9% rise made the rounds and…

"The chart also shows that the current economic situation is much weaker in several euro-area periphery countries. The recession in Greece has yet to end, and real GDP is now more than 17 percent below its prior peak. While a recovery…

This chart from the Wall Street Journal explains visually what worries me about the supercharged run up in the S&P500. While the index is increasing, earnings growth is not.

One word can summarize today's report: disappointing. The 120k rise in the headline figure was roughly half of the whisper figure. The unemployment rate ticked down to 8.2%, but the details are disappointing.

The yen was the weakest of the major currencies in Q1, losing about 7.2% against the dollar. There was a clear shift in both speculative and portfolio flows. This is just one of seven observations about the Yen via Marc Chandler.

Remember the scene in A few Good Men where Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) and Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) trade insults? Following some pretty intense questioning, Kaffee yells at Jessup: “I want the truth”. With the deadly glare that…

There has been a lot of back and forth in the financial and economics blogosphere about the centrality of financial institutions and their facilitation of private debt accumulation leading up to the Great Financial Crisis. It seems to me…