G7
Mounting Impatience With Obama
March 30, 2009
In its pre-U.S. election issue entitled “It’s time,” The Economist ran a cover photo of Barack Obama looking somewhat downward but striding confidently forward. The picture and black-lettered message are set against a white backdrop. That issue endorsed the Obama candidacy, conceding some risk in the choice but explaining that he had “campaigned with more […] More
Currency Intervention: Can It Get a Little Respect, Please?
March 12, 2009
Currency intervention occurs when central bankers either for their bank’s own account or as an agent for the government buy or sell other currencies against their own money in the marketplace with the intent of influencing the exchange rate. Intervention is needed to enforce fixed exchange rates and remains one of several tools of monetary […] More
Distressing Economic Data
March 10, 2009
The week is still young, but economic data have been strikingly poor. Germany and Japan reported further sharp declines in exports. German shipments fell 18.1% in the three months between October and January, an annualized decline of 55%. For Japan the drop was 40.7% between October and January or 87.5% annualized. British industrial production in […] More
Much More Than a Financial System Gone Bad
March 9, 2009
An Op-Ed column in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times by Tom Friedman portrays 2008 as an historic year of inflection when depleting natural resources collided with unsustainable demands for more and more stuff. In the old regime, new stores forever sprouted to sell things built in developing economies like China, and money recycled into U.S. […] More
Expected GDP Growth in 2010
March 9, 2009
The newest issue of The Economist contains results from its March survey of forecasters and, for the first time, includes projections for 2010. Three facts stick out. The first is a dramatic 2.1 percentage point revision of projected Japanese growth in 2009 to minus 5.3% from minus 3.2% that was was the consensus view in […] More
Some Reflections on U.S. Job Losses And Unemployment
March 6, 2009
In the five reported months to February since the engineered bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the U.S. economy shed 2.964 million jobs, and the unemployment rate climbed 1.9 percentage points to 8.1%. The monthly pace of job destruction was 662K in December-February, the greatest three-month drop since the 1930’s. The six-month erosion rate of employment was […] More
Was Last Quarter a Depression?
March 2, 2009
People are increasingly using the term “depression” especially to describe the economy last quarter and currently. Contraction has been rapid for both jobs and GDP, and the downturn extends to most economies. U.S. circumstances do not qualify yet but may before this event is over. The unemployment rate remains more than a percentage point below […] More
Today's U.S. Economic Data
February 26, 2009
New jobless claims are a gauge of the layoff rate and therefore a leading indicator of future consumer spending and GDP growth. What took almost five months for the layoff rate to climb about 100K from 440K on average in the four weeks to September 6th to 543K on average in the four weeks to […] More
Will The Global Economy Emerge Stronger?
February 25, 2009
It’s been another tough session for U.S. stocks, and the DOW as on Monday is testing 7197, which prior to this week had been its lowest previous intra-day level of the current decade, touched in October 2002. Before then, the DJIA had not been below 7197 since May 16, 1997. Much is being made of […] More
G-7 Industrial Orders Bad All Over
February 24, 2009
In today’s overnight summary of economic news and market developments, I editorialized that the steep drop in Euroland industrial orders last quarter was as close as one generally gets to a free-falling trend. The intent of this post is not to rescind that comment but to extend it to the rest of the Group of […] More
