recession

I have been making bullish noises of late, but I am fully cognizant of all the downside risks.  So for the sake of presenting both sides to this argument, I want to highlight the ‘dark’ side in this post based on a book I have just read.…

I am watching Bernanke at the congressional hearing.  You can see his prepared testimony at CR here.  But, the general take on what he is saying is that the economy has reached its worst rate of decline and should improve steadily until it…

Today, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released its Non-Manufacturing Survey on Business. The overall index increased to 43.7 in April from 40.8 in March.  As 50 is the demarcation line for a growing economy, these numbers…

A post from Reuters in overnight trading in Asia caught my eye.  It proclaimed “Asia faces up to challenges of global crisis." What I found particularly interesting about the post was the fact that the Asians had set up a $120…

For most of the last few years, I have been labeled a perma-bear, that is someone who looks at the situation from a reflexively skeptical glass half-empty bias. One only need peruse our archives to get that impression. In fact, that is…

Ten-year treasuries are yielding about 3.15% now, that is a significant increase from a yield of just over 2% in December. I for one, thought that Treasuries were in a bubble at 2% (See my post, "Treasurys are in a bubble" from December…

I have done my part over the past few weeks to write that I thought jobless claims signaled the potential for recovery. I started the drumbeat in late March. Here are the posts:

We are starting to get a sense of who the winners and losers of the Great Unraveling are. Spain is definitely a loser. Just think, a few years ago Spain was the envy of Western Europe with a dynamic and booming property market and…

This is from the Globe & Mail: Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney is signalling frustration with the Obama administration's handling of the financial crisis, saying delays in shoring up the banking system in the United States have…

This is a post I originally posted over at Yves Smith's site, Naked Capitalism, in April 2008. My intent here is not to malign Obama, Roosevelt or Hoover or make facile comparison but to identify important differences between the economic…