The employment report confirms other evidence that the economy is accelerating to the downside. In comparison to other recession this looks like a very typical recessions. But to see how sever it is we will have to wait to see how long it last. Hours worked are weakening even more than earlier in the year. […]
By Spencer. Yesterday Movie Guy cited some data that supposedly disproved my claim that the belt from West Virginia across the southern border of Tennessee to Arkansas was a poverty belt. I think this chart of income by county strongly shows my analysis was correct even though there are some very poor counties that were […]
By Spencer This map in today’s New York Times is fascinating. It is of the counties that voted more republican this year than in 2004. But if you did a map of the poorest counties in the US it would be almost identical. It shows the people that vote to keep themselves barefoot and pregnant.
There are several old timers that post here and I wonder if they have election stories they could tell while we wait for the exit polls. My story is about the 1964 LBJ-Goldwater election. In 1964 I was living in Venezuela and on election day I was way down in the interior, a days drive […]
Since George Bush was elected President eight years ago the stock market is down about one-third. Yet, Larry Kudlow and the other non-partisan analysts on CNBC keep insisting they want more of the same policies. They just do not learn do they.
By Spencer I just posted this in the comments at Marginal Revolution to explain why the view that expanding bank lending demonstrates that their is no crises is incorrect. By looking at bank lending you are looking at the wrong side of the bank’s balance sheet. The point that bank lending is expanding is not […]
By Spencer One of the strongest points being made about economic policy is that the Bush tax cuts must be extended because of the economic crises. Yes, standard analysis is that a tax hike in the middleof an economic downturn is bad policy as far as short run economic stimulous. But maybe part of our […]
By Spencer Yesterday Warren Buffett wrote about stocks now being a bargain. It lead me to look at a measure of valuation I have not calculated recently, the S&P 500 PE on trend EPS. We all know there are problems with the various measures of earnings used to calculate valuations and none of them are […]
By Spencer Industrial production fell 2.8%in September. But about 2 and a quarter percentage points of that was due to hurricanes. If you back the hurricane impact out, September output would be about where the X is on the chart. This implies that manufacturing output is continuing to demonstrate roughly the same type of declines […]
The market bounced back today to almost where it was on Wednesday. But if you look at how the various sectors did the market is not only discounting that the bailout will work, but that it will be inflationary because the market bet on energy and raw materials today, not financials. Moreover, the market is […]