retail

This report is disturbing because of how the headline number masks real and troubling weakness in the more substantive details. Hopefully anyone trying to engineer the economy is basing their tinkering on better information than that…

Taken to its end, industrialization class distinctions are revealed by conspicuous consumption. This points to the objective of industrial production: goods in the realm of common consumption become removed from social distinction. This is…

My last weekly said the hand-in-hand Fed activism and fiscal activism via Obama's mortgage proposal is bullish. Let me add a bit of colour here.

The Wall Street Journal's Stu Woo reports on how Amazon ramps up for the Christmas selling season in a much-read write-up for the paper with a focus on the thoughts of holiday season workers like 75-year old Ray Williams and his wife…

News links for 7 December 2011 featuring thoughts on a French downgrade, the austerity budget in Ireland, patents and China and other stories

Financial news links for 6 December 2011 featuring stories on MF Global, Facebook, class divides and retail sales.

Here’s a good all-encompassing Bloomberg TV video with Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach from Friday. He is not impressed with the IMF plans that the Europeans are working on, calling the numbers “chump change”. Roach also talks about the US…

News links for 4 December 2011.

Analysis: Are Americans really shopping until they drop? | Reuters One glance at the numbers for the first big weekend of holiday shopping and you might think Americans are flush with cash and spending it freely. But a deeper…

There have been several important developments over the weekend which are likely to support the euro at the start of the week, after falling for the past four consecutive weeks and recording a 7-week low before the weekend. However, I…