By Spencer, What is causing the rise in oil prices? Part of it is that $30 oil in December was most likely too low, and as the world economy and oil demand bottomed, oil prices should have also bottomed. OK, that should explain oil in the $30 -$50 range. I expected to see oil bounce […]
By Spencer, Sorry, I have been tied up with other things and have not done my usual charts on the employment report. Others seem to be doing a pretty good job. But I would like to point out the issue that seems to be overlooked by everyone.That is the point that we are now starting […]
By Spencer, Is there any truth to the reports that Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich are proposing that we need to cut tax rates on dividends and capital gains to deal with the swine flu?
By Spencer, Given all the attention the press is giving the 100 days results I though people might find this chart of interest. There is a wide spread convention to use the election day as a base for the stock market because of the belief that the market is a way of discounting future results. […]
By Spencer Industrial production fell 1.5% in March, the same as in February. From the peak industrial production has now fallen 13.4%. This makes it worse than the 13.0% fall in the 1974 and 1958 recessions and the 9.3% drop in the 1982 recessions. This measure says this is now the deepest post WW II […]
By Spencer The March employment report continued the trend of the last few months with payroll employment down 694,000, about the same as the last few months. This brought the unemployment rae to 8.5% and job loses of some 5.3 million over the past year.The one encouraging item was a repeat of last month where […]
By Spencer, Just checked this years Federal Register. In Team Bush’s final year it was 80,700 pages long, the second highest on record. But now that we have the complete Bush record we find that on average the Register was 75,894 pages over the eight years of his terms. This set a new record for […]
By Spencer The updated fourth quarter real GDP revisions really did not have much interesting information. But maybe the most important data was the release of fourth quarter profits, especially for financial corporations. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008 financial corporation profits fell from $370.3 billion to $122.4 billion, […]
By Spencer, Did you know that over the last six months the compound growth of the total CPI was -5.0%. Of course that is up from January when it was – 5.8%. You have to go back to 1948 to find actual deflation like this, when it bottomed at -4.2%.. Of course much of the […]
By Spencer The details within the leading index provided some very interesting details. Within the current index real manufacturing and trade sales were: ……………………….(million 2000 $)Dec 08…………………..893,617Jan 09…………………..895,824Feb 09…………………..896,837 An uptick in real manufacturing and sales is generally a concurrent indicator of the end of a recession. Of Course this depends on the assumption that […]