recession

Credit underwriters pride themselves in their ability to cut lending when they sense that economic fundamentals have changed for the worse. For example one often hears bankers talking about passing on deals in 2007 because of "not liking…

Despite all the talk of recovery in Europe, the data suggest that the improvement in Europe is uneven at best now. The core has moved into a cyclical upturn but a lot of work remains in places like Italy and Greece. Today's data points…

What follows is an interview I did over the summer with the Madrid based publication The Local.

I continue to anticipate a recovery in Europe in the second half of this year. The manufacturing PMI data that were released this morning suggest we could be in recovery before the end of the quarter. This makes me relatively upbeat about…

Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, was on "Bloomberg Surveillance" this morning repeating his claim that a US recession "began around the middle of last year".

The core of the issue is not whether the country could see one, or even two, quarters of positive performance, but whether any faltering recovery will be sustained out into the future, through 2014 and beyond. It is here that all the old…

The European Union released figures for Q4 2012 GDP today and they were awful. GDP fell by 0.6% in the euro zone and 0.5% in the entire EU. Stock markets are getting clobbered on the news and the euro is selling off. This is not unexpected…

In the links this morning, I linked to a Handelsblatt interview with the head of Austria's social democratic EU parliamentarians. The overall gist of his comments were that he believed the EU budget was 'catastrophic' because it was in…

My thesis these past few years is that a fiscal retrenchment to reduce deficits in the US was likely to lead to a shortened business cycle. I have been saying since 2013 began that politics favoured the United States going into austerity…

As you may have heard already, the jobs numbers for the US came out and they confirmed that the US private sector continues to create 150-200,000 new jobs each month. This is consistent with moderate and does not indicate any signs of…