Forecasts

By Michael Pettis For the past two years, as regular readers know, I have been bearish on hard commodities. Prices may have dropped substantially from their peaks during this time, but I don’t think the bear market is over. I think we…

By Sober Look Back in May we discussed the impact of several possible "fiscal cliff" scenarios on the US GDP growth (the GDP drag). Those projections were developed by Goldman. We now have a similar analysis performed by Credit Suisse. CS…

I wrote a piece in the New York Times that appeared yesterday along with Mark Thoma and John Cochrane. The question was "Should the Fed Risk Inflation to Spur Growth?" My answer was that the Fed should always keep an eye on inflation as…

Here's another Tech Ticker segment on the state of the economy. Noted economic bear Gary Shilling believes the US is in recession or will be entering one shortly. His view is that wages have not grown robustly enough to warrant the level of…

I want to revisit Richard Koo's comments three weeks ago after his meeting with a number of German policymakers. I think they are illuminating in terms of why Euro crisis policy is as it is. And given the downturn in German economic…

We first noticed the first signs that the economy was beginning to soften about three months ago. Now the evidence of a slowdown has become so overwhelming that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are headed for a recession. We…

My thesis at the start of the year was that European equities would outperform despite the sovereign debt crisis because of relative value vis-a-vis the United States. It seems that Jeremy Grantham and Marc Faber agree with those sentiments…

The problem cannot simply be a problem of current account imbalances—we’ve got them all across the US states. And the US, itself, runs a chronic current account deficit. But the US federal government is sovereign, it issues its own…

I would love to see ECRI explain why they have changed the date when they felt recession would begin and whether this means they were wrong in forecasting recession in 2011. yesterday, I said " I don’t think Achuthan is changing his story…

I have Bloomberg copy and a video of a recent performance by ECRI's Lakshman Achuthan on Tom Keene's show. A lot of people have been pouring scorn on business cycle forecaster Achuthan because of his company's recession forecast. I suspect…