interest rates

Unadjusted jobless claims after the holiday season are always monstrous because of seasonality. Last week 645,571 people filed initial claims for unemployment insurance in the United States.  That is down from the 731,958 who filed at…

This quote from Caroline Baum sums things up pretty well about the Fed's complicity in blowing a massive bubble in housing and in stocks before it. I know Bernanke has given this issue a great deal of thought and devoted the Fed’s…

Given the fact that I have just finished writing two articles on Wien’s predictions for 2010, I thought it relevant to look back at the last three years of Wien’s surprises to just before the housing crisis.  I posted the 2009 predictions…

Byron Wien was amazingly accurate last year in his economic predictions even though his annual list is an attempt to build a non-consensus list of likely outlier events. So, I was eager to see Byron Wien's 2010 surprises, which were…

I will have some commentary on this in a future post or an updated version of this one. Update 1600 ET: you can see my commentary in the next post here. The Surprises of 2010 The United States economy grows at a stronger than expected…

About three months ago, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman took a stab at explaining why economists didn’t anticipate the worst financial crisis in three-quarters of a century. His was a long piece, taking up eight pages and 6,000…

The dust has settled a bit on the Treasury’s recent decision to give Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a green light to nationalize our mortgage problem. Calculated Risk says the move was not necessarily done on Christmas Eve to escape notice. And…

I wrote a post yesterday (The Fed’s exit strategy) to explain the mechanics surrounding Monday’s Federal Reserve announcement that it is offering CD accounts to banks. The Federal Reserve does not control the demand for credit and therefore…

For the period leading up to the panic last year, I had been warning of a rather severe recession. My view at the time was that what was needed was a realignment of America’s industrial organization away from finance and housing where…