recovery

I tend to put a lot of stock in jobless claims as a coincident (real-time) indicator of the economic scene. My reasoning here is fairly simple. Household spending makes up 70% of the economy. Households are dependent on labour wages for the…

The following is a post by James K. Galbraith as originally published this Monday at the New America Foundation's website. In July 2008, in a memorandum for the Obama campaign team and later published in Challenge,  I wrote as…

Electoral disaster has a way of focusing the mind. Perhaps this is the best way to explain President Obama’s latest initiatives: an investment in the nation’s roads, railways and runways that would cost at least $50 billion, along with a…

In a recent FT Op-ed, entitled "Estonia’s recovery defies economists and academics", columnist John Dizard argued that "the “internal devaluation” policy, which means cuts in nominal costs such as wages and rents, was very…

By John Lounsbury David Rosenberg, chief economist for Toronto's Gluskin Sheff, has a graph showing the history of the Philly Fed Business Outlook Survey.  I have added annotations below: Before this month and since 1968 there have…

As the IMF say in their most recent staff report, the present economic crisis raises the question of whether potential output growth in Bulgaria in the years to come is going to be markedly lower than it was during the boom years. As the…

By Comstock Partners It becomes clearer every day that the economy is headed for a renewed recession or a recovery so slow it will seem like one. Initial unemployment claims climbed to 500,000 last week for the first time since November…

Confidence Has Returned To Europe’s Financial Markets, But Lasting Economic Growth May Not Be So Easy To Achieve ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet was in rather optimistic, one might even say jovial, mood at the press conference which…

By Comstock Partners We have maintained all along that the statistical economic recovery would lose momentum after the effects of the stimulus and inventory replenishment wore off, and the recent data are confirming our view. Moreover…

By John Mauldin. "... has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess…