Weekly Economic and Market Review
“We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting.” Ben Bernanke at his press conference last week following the FOMC meeting. That was – by far – the most important...
View ArticleWeekly Economic And Market Review
Well, at least August is finally over. The S&P 500 lost a bit over 5% on the month but that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. It was one of the most volatile months on record with 15 daily...
View ArticleTrend Watcher – 2012 Expectations
Joseph A. Gomez, Sr. Investment Advisor Will 2012 be a repeat of “Sell in May and Go Away”? Collectively, strategists are expecting the S&P 500 to finish 2012 at 1,350, which would be a gain of...
View ArticleHistory Repeats Itself Because No One Was Listening The First Time
File these under Joe Calhoun’s “everything has already happened” theme. In doing research for last Friday’s RealClearMarkets column I happened to read the Republican Party Platform. I was mostly...
View ArticleEinstein, Bernanke and Shampoo
Mandates are tricky enough when it comes to interpretation of how to best and most efficiently achieve them. This is especially true when the act of fostering a mandate or moving a system toward the...
View ArticleThere’s That Word Again
The Federal Reserve on a few separate occasions, as I noted late last week, has begun to peremptorily quash the growing use of the loaded word “bubble”. From academic papers to Fed speeches, US...
View ArticleGreenspan Without Style
When I mentioned that Greenspan’s market has persisted long after his words fell from memory, that extended to overextended stock investors as well. By almost any measure, Ben Bernanke has outdone the...
View ArticleFed’s ‘Taper’ Talk Is Targeted
The talk of tapering QE has been incessant the past few weeks, no doubt playing a huge role in the volatility of the US Treasury market (as if there is some competition with the JGB market)....
View ArticleIf You Can’t Win, Change the Standards
In trying to sound modest and even magnanimous, Ben Bernanke in November 2010 penned an oped in the Washington Post justifying the recently implemented QE 2. Toward the end of his piece he acknowledged...
View ArticleTrend-Cycle Theory, Hiding In Revision
It is nearly impossible to spot recession and economic weakness in real time through economic accounts alone. Because of the way economic estimates are gathered and, more importantly, calculated, they...
View ArticleBernanke Expects Downward Revisions In Jobs?
Chairman Bernanke stole the show yesterday, certainly by his accommodative and now contradictory stand. I suppose that is the danger in trying to talk “markets” toward “targets”, much like Greenspan in...
View ArticlePiling On Jobs Revisions
Seasonal adjustments have legitimate use only when there is a recognizable and relatively unbroken patterning in a data series. But most statistical agencies and their collection methods do not or...
View ArticleIt’s The Fed’s World, Bonds Are Just Living In It
The JC Penney bond curve finally got the message this week that the company is in serious jeopardy, teetering close to collapse. The stock has been trending lower since February 2012, having lost some...
View ArticleBrazil May Already Be Toast
Everything that happens has already happened at some point or another in history. The tortured history of crises occurs because no one was paying attention the first time. It is eerie, though, how...
View ArticleNaked Intellectual Aggression of Kallipolis
The first paragraph of this article in the Financial Times reveals perhaps more about the inability of the policy to render any successful result than anything I have seen in a long, long time. It’s...
View ArticleIn Bernanke’s Shoes
This week is a perfect illustration of the absurdity of “investing” in this activist age. It wasn’t all that long ago the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was just some obscure bureaucrat that barely...
View ArticleStall Speed Revisit
If the government shutdown ends in the near future, there will be a data dump unlike anything we have seen before. The September jobs report at the end of October the same time as retail sales and US...
View ArticleEstablishment Survey Totally Off The Rails
The ongoing divergence between the Establishment Survey (which is the “preferred” measure) and every other labor market indication was taken to an unbelievable extreme in October. Incongruous...
View ArticleThe Politics of Inflation
What is most disheartening about the current political formulation on economics is the bipartisan acceptance of “inflation.” It comes from both the left and the right. That is in full part due to the...
View ArticleIt’s That Time Of Year
While everyone gears up for the holiday season, particularly the Christmas break, economists and retailers are on the edge of their computer screens trying to determine and gauge the health of the...
View Article
More Pages to Explore .....