United States

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…

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…

I don't write about jobless claims that much any more because I don't see the claims number as an interesting data point unless there are large shifts to the upside or downside. But since I am now looking for signs of recession, it behoves…

Although the House GOP leadership has been divided on how to deal with the upcoming fiscal contests, they have apparently decided to raise the debt ceiling and focus on the sequester as I have predicted.

In the past year, I have increasingly turned away from the US housing market to stress the difficulties now besetting other global housing markets because there have been large house price appreciations (and some declines) elsewhere in…

This analysis via Stan Collender and Greg Sargent on the political calculus Republicans in Congress have to make dovetails with what I wrote yesterday why a US government shutdown is likely. I think the analysis also makes sense for the…

Yesterday, I wrote why a US fiscal standoff should mean recession in Q2. As an adjunct to that, I wanted to add a few words about the political process on how we get the standoff to a government shutdown and recession.

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…