Obama

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 would submit then that the problem is the debt. This is true right across the developed economies. Until the debt is reduced, global growth will be slow and that makes economies susceptible to recession. As much as the President wants to…

I thought now would be a good time to see how my ten surprises for 2012 are tracking as we are nearly a third of the way through the year. I posted these as my first weekly newsletter and these are events that have 1-in-3 odds of happening…

The latest Gallup poll shows the approval rating for Congress at a record low 10%. 86% disapprove.

The Obama administration’s record of prosecuting elite financial frauds is worse than the Bush administration’s record, which is a very large statement. Neither administration has prosecuted any elite CEO for the epidemic of mortgage fraud…

Fannie and Freddie have already been nationalized and the government is already on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars of losses as a result. Clearly, this makes it a lot easier to use the GSEs as vehicles to pump money into the…

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships…

Permanent zero can work over the medium-term but the economy is dependent on employment growth and monetary policy doesn't drive that.

I was on CNBC yesterday ahead of Ben Bernanke's speech explaining the FOMC's recent decision to add an explicit inflation target to its decision to extend its rate easing/permanent zero policy. My conclusion: the Obama mortgage plan and…

Investors must still be worried about the fallout from the European meltdown. However, the situation in the US is looking much better than it did last week because of this aggressive policy response.