recession

US GDP contracted at a 0.1% annualised rate in Q4 of 2012 according to preliminary estimates announced by the US government earlier today. This contraction was well below consensus estimates and comes as a shock to most of the analyst…

As I have been predicting since the beginning of the year, I believe the Republicans will be able to force through some form of austerity before the budget battles in Washington are over this quarter. As the year began, we saw the fiscal…

While Germany's numbers for Q4 2012 were poor, showing a contraction of 0.5%, I noted in my last post on Germany that this does not mean recession. The contraction was due to export and capital investment figures, which look to rebound in…

The last post predicted a recession in the United States for Q2 as a result of the fiscal standoff in the United States. However, as I have been largely upbeat about the underlying fundamentals in the United States, this call is predicated…

Last Tuesday I said then that the debt ceiling fight would come first but that default on US public debt would be a step too far - and so Republicans would capitulate, forcing them to put their efforts into the sequester cuts. The biggest…

This is going to be a quick hit. But I thought I should put this out there now that the Platinum Coin idea has been rejected, something that makes this downside scenario more likely. The idea here is that we are in an interregnum period…

The real takeaway, however, is that the solution to the fiscal cliff problem involves some combination of tax increases and federal spending cuts. To the extent that at least some of it is front-loaded into 2013, which is likely, the result…

The election is now over and it's time to think about what is to come. The most pressing political concern is the so-called fiscal cliff that has resulted from a budget deal Washington's politicians cobbled together to avoid default during…

There has been a bit of talk about jobless claims since the abnormally large fall in claims two weeks ago. Those numbers were skewed by reporting anomalies that were adjusted in the subsequent week. Looking beyond the week to week data,…

The first article here highlights the tenor of recent economic data. The global economy continues to slow, with the US doing relatively better than Europe in the wake of the financial crisis that began five years ago. Nevertheless, slowing…