I remain very skeptical about the sustainability of the recovery, as the labor market is in shambles and nominal wage growth is unlikely to facilitate “healthy” deleveraging – please see this recent post “Reducing household financial leverage: the easy way and the hard way”. I digress; because you can’t fight the data. And for now, […]

Is it really Good News that changes in Real Private Inventories were 3.4% of that 5.7% Q-on-Q GDP in Q4? (h/t Alea’s Twitter feed) Most reasonable assumption: firms overproduced, relative to actual buying, in anticipation of the Xmas season. Maybe more later.

No matter who “won.” Anyone who knows the phrase “think at the margin”—with or without the differential calculus and comparative statics—would have predicted that the Bankruptcy Bill (a.k.a. The Ken Lewis Retirement Subsidy Act) would damage to the economy when it was least able to survive the damage. What no one knew for certain was […]

I am member of AAII (American Association of Individual Investors). They send out their Investor survey results every week. This weeks:Bullish 25.58% Long term avg. 39.3%Neutral 21.71% Long term avg. 31.9%Bearish 52.71% Long term avg. 28.8% We have all read exuberant stories about how wonderful Black Friday was. The WSJ is doing it’s part to […]