» Economy

You have to love the mainstream media.  With each and every data point that is released there is ”hopium” sprinkled about as if a new age revolution is upon us.  Of course, in reality the data is just so bad from a historical standpoint that we ALL want the situation to get better. ...

Advocates of government stimulus are running victory laps on recent developments that appear to vindicate their strategy. In particular, Paul Krugman compares the sluggish growth in Europe to the somewhat-less-sluggish growth in the US to prove that stimulus was more effective than austerity. Other...

Over the weekend I received an email from a reader discussing the economy and a series of risk indicators that he follows.  Three are direct measures of financial stress while the other two are focused on the broader economy.   Of course, since finance is the life blood of any economy it is not a...

The Weekly Leading Index (WLI) growth indicator of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) posted -4.3 in its latest reading, data through February 3rd. The latest public data point is a reduced contraction from last week’s -5.3 (a slight downward revision from the previously reported -5....

What to do?  This is not as an innocuous question as one might think.  For most American families, who have to balance their living standards to their income, face this conundrum each and every month.  Today, more than ever, the walk to the end of the driveway has become a dreaded thing as bills ...

Bernanke’s testimony to the House last week and to the Senate yesterday held no surprises. Ben has promised to maintain monetary policy at DEFCON 4 levels for as far into the future as we can see. The prepared remarks were identical for both presentations. I reviewed Bernanke’s 10/4/2011 tes...

Inquiring minds are watching a plunge in Petroleum Distillates and Gasoline usage. Reader Tim Wallace writes Hello Mish As I have been telling you recently, there is some unprecedented data coming out in petroleum distillates, and they slap me in the face and tell me we have some very bad economic ...

ADP released their monthly employment report this morning that can in a bit weaker than expected.   Before we get into the report it is important to remember that with the ADP report an individual only had to work ONE hour within the given reporting period to be counted as employed.   The month o...

In this video clip, taken from Robert Prechter’s interview with The Mind of Money, Prechter and host Douglass Lodmell discuss “real” money vs the FIAT money system, and what is backing your dollars under our current system. Enjoy this 4-minute clip and then watch Prechter’s f...

There has been a deluge of articles recently about the upticks in the housing data.  The consensus is that these data points are surely pointing , finally, to a bottom in the depressing decline of real estate.  Let me acknowledge that I do not dispute the improvement in the data regarding home sta...

I have not posted a skew chart in quite a while. Admittedly it was getting difficult to draw conclusions from some of the wild price action. That was until the past few days when the skew literally shot out of a cannon. While the vix remains in a descending wedge and narrowing in daily price fluctua...

For the last several months I have been scratching my head about the Leading Economic Indicator Index (LEI), as published by the Conference Board, due to the divergence between it and other leading indicators that we watch.  The LEI has risen extremely sharply while real indications of the economy ...