retail

The first reading of 3rd quarter GDP was released this morning, with the headline coming in right on top of estimates at 2%. The happy surprise of the report was personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which were better than expectations…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). "That the economists...can explain neither prices nor the rate of…

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following news release today: Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an…

by Michael Pettis I am often asked, especially by my Peking University students, to list what I think is the sequence of steps China will take to address its economic imbalances.  Remember that rebalancing, in the Chinese context, has…

Earlier today, Japan's second largest consumer lender, Takefuji sought legal protection of bankruptcy. The source of its woes, and apparently others in that space, is that the borrowers were overcharged interest. Japan's regulator says that…

by the Consumer Metrics Institute We founded the Consumer Metrics Institute precisely because we felt that the economic bureaucrats in Washington were out of touch with the economy that most of us live in. They remind us of those patients…

The Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey which concluded last week showed a high level of concern amongst top financial officers in major organizations worldwide. Of note are the CFOs ideas regarding employment and…

There were three pieces of data today that give the complete picture for the consumer economy right now. My read of the data says we are now in a holding pattern awaiting more concrete evidence that the technical recovery which began last…

John Hussman is not buying the recent risk-on sentiment that has developed since September began. For example, retail sales numbers are to be released tomorrow.  Marc Chandler has said that a number above consensus estimates of 0.3%…

Jobless claims have been quite elevated of late, averaging around 450-480,000 for the past few months. While these are worrying figures, they do not in and of themselves point to recession. In my last post I used a chart of the year-on-year…