A correspondent notes CJR found a good scoop by the FT: Merrill Lynch paid out about $4 billion in bonuses just days before Bank of America took it over, the Financial Times says this morning. What raises the eyebrows is the timing: Merrill paid its bonuses before the year was even up, “an unusual step” […]

by Bruce Webb(UPDATE: this piece was not drawing any attention so I decided to move it under the fold and save some screen space. But the headline tells the story. He predicted the global slowdown and some specific events in S. Korea and got hauled away in handcuffs. Details below.)Prescient Young Blogger Did What S. […]

By Spencer I have been working on setting up bear market shading in my charts rather than recession shading. The results were so unexpected and striking that I though I would share them. First, like recessions these is not a set definition of a bear market. The generally accepted rule of thumb is over a […]

rdan As the Obama administration issues executive orders and eventually implements policies, we have an obligation to watch how policies mature and how they are actually implemented. As cactus has noted with an old Russian proverb, “Trust, but verify.” Probably a good way to start this year 2009 overall. And the executive branch is only […]

There is a reason I never believe people who judge the health of a company by its credit rating: the evidence isn’t there, and everyone in the market knows it isn’t there. Here is a prime example: General Electric (GE; the company that Jack eviscerated) has a AAA credit rating. It is also paying a […]

There has been a great deal of recent discussion insisting that the various New Deal programs did not get this country out of the Depression, only World War II did that. And no one that I know of argues that the level of unemployment right through the 30’s was not unacceptably high. But I want […]

Robert Waldmann Robert Barro wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The substance of the op-ed is to report an estimate of the Fiscal multiplier 0.8 which is less than one. Thus, according to Barro, a stimulus will partially crowd out of investment, consumption or net exports and not just reduced leisure. Paul Krugman […]

rdan … Angry Bear (2,447 links) is the product of a half dozen Ph.D economists, an historian, and financial professionals. The writers provide individual perspectives on broad sectors of the economy based on their unique training. They look at topics as varied as worldwide trade and industrial production and US government programs and regulations like […]

By Spencer Historically quality spreads are leading and/or concurrent indicators of capacity utilization. So are these extreme quality spreads a forecast of capacity utilization and/or the economy?