Forecasts

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…

My position since October 2009 has been that the United States could not hold off deficit hawks for more than three or four years. 2013 is the deadline for that prediction to be fulfilled and we are right on schedule with the fiscal cliff…

Australian property market is seeing transaction volume fall. Preliminary Melbourne sales data for 2012 from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria says that 69,000 home sales were registered last year. While that is a fall of only 3,000…

The top two stories in today's links are on shale oil and the fiscal cliff. I will concentrate on the shale oil issue and say a few parting words about the fiscal cliff. We have three articles on shale oil here and I think the lead article…

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…

Yves Smith has an interesting post out asking whether student loans are going the way of subprime, potentially triggering another financial crisis if the US goes into recession. I think it's a good question to ask in light of my last weekly…

My thesis for the smartphone industry is that the industry will be increasingly driven by the conversion of price-sensitive buyers in developed and emerging markets from lesser phones or no phones to smartphones. The market for high-priced…

One lesson we should keep in mind as we recover in the aftermath of Sandy is that we are slow learners. Although the vulnerability of many of these communities is undeniable, we have resolved to rebuild the homes. That resolve will no doubt…

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…