recession

That's the title of a UK Telegraph article on a report showing that UK repossession orders have increased to levels not seen since the housing bust of the early 1990s. According to this morning's BBC 5 Live program, "Wake Up To Money," the…

Spain is perhaps the next domino in the global credit bubble to fall. The UK economy is slowing as well, but the pace of slowing in Spain is truly remarkable.According to Spanish-language news reports I have seen today (see Round-up),…

As with the GDP numbers last week, the employment numbers were very dubious indeed. The headline number was still a loss of 20,000 jobs. However, the detail point to likely revisions much beyond that number when more exact data have been…

This weekend I received a disturbing newsletter from John Mauldin, provacatively entitled " Lies and Other Statistics," that dissected the GDP numbers where the headline number was +0.6%. Digging into the detail reveals a completely…

There was heavy overbuilding in Spain as the global housing bubble caught fire there these past years. Now, Spain's bubble has burst and it is having dire economic consequences. The Spanish National Statistics Office released the most…

The banking crisis in the U.S. is taking on a significant turn for the worse as banks tighten the screws on consumers. With banks facing record writedowns to their equity capital, they are looking to limit their exposure to the mortgage…

I have been in Europe for a while and am back at blogging after a two-week hiatus. This morning I was listening to "Wake Up To Money," a British finance show that one can hear via podcast. The gist of the discussion was that the UK…

Update: Also see my list of Bankrupt global financial institutions. Recently, the pace of writedowns by major money center banks has increased. UBS announced today it wrote down $19 billion. Deutsche Bank announced today it wrote down $4…

When the going gets tough, the tough turn into populists. Or at least that's what we have seen time and again throughout history. In the 1930s, as the Great Depression was savaging the American Economy, people trembled in fear at the…