financial history

A friend who is a well-connected Washington insider sent me the text of a piece by Ben Smith on how successful TARP was late last night, asking: This is the first mention I’ve seen in the more mainstream media. Anybody raise this in…

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…

This week the following graph from https://www.chartoftheday.com https://www.chartoftheday.com/ has been annotated by the author to highlight similarities of the current era for stocks to a corporate earnings pattern traced out nearly a…

By Jeff Clark, Senior Editor, Casey’s Gold & Resource Report The talk of a possible double dip is now common banter on TV investment programs. And indeed, deflationary forces seem to have the stronger grip right now than inflationary…

By Annaly Capital Management. On Tuesday July 27th, the Census Bureau released homeownership rate data for the second quarter of 2010, which showed a continued decline to 66.9% from a peak of 69.4% in 2004. This rate hasn’t been below 67%…

From Comstock Partners In a scholarly paper that was released today James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, stated, "The U.S. is closer to a Japanese-style outcome than at any time in recent…

This is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis piece by James Bullard that everyone is talking about. Here's the money quote: Under current policy in the U.S., the reaction to a negative shock is perceived to be a promise to stay low…

Barry Ritholtz offers this graph (courtesy of The Chart Store). Barry offers no further comment with the graph, but I started to wonder if the "bubble" in capitalization could be explained by the increase in business done…

If you want to cut taxes and say you prefer them to increased spending, fine. But let's not act like tax cuts reduce the deficit. They don't. When I say economists and policy makers abuse economic ideology for political purposes, this is…

By Michael Pettis In the past few weeks I have been getting a lot of questions about serial sovereign defaults and how to predict which countries will or won’t suspend debt payments or otherwise get into trouble.  The most common…