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China and commodities bull Jim Rogers thinks the economy is going to eventually run out of gas by 2012. While he doesn’t call this a double dip, he does say that “the next time it’s going to be worse because we’ve shot all of our bullets.” With zero interest rates and huge government deficits all [...]

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Last week the federal Reserve released its quarterly flow of funds data. I have been unusually slow to parse the numbers. But I did do a very comprehensive sweep of the historical data in an October 2009 post called A brief look at the Asset-Based Economy at economic turns.
The overall conclusion of this analysis [...]

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As Irwin Stelzer argued in a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, Spain’s Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero seems to be an admirer of Charles Dickens’s character Mr. Micawber. When asked what he plans to do about Spain’s 11.4% fiscal deficit, first he promises to extend the retirement age, only to later [...]

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I was talking to a friend of mine who does emerging market investing for a living and I asked him what he made of recent China-bullish comments by Stephen Roach. 
The Morgan Stanley Asia head was in Germany speaking to German business daily Handelsblatt last week. The guys from Handelsblatt wrote up a piece called [...]

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Well, I for one can’t help thinking that it’s now well time we all stopped getting carried away with the use of so many acronyms. Not only may one man’s meat easily prove to be another’s poison, it may even be that for some the entire meal will be so distasteful as to prove totally [...]

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The video below from the Wall Street Journal gets at the heart of why the bailouts have been so toxic for the economy. Banks, still laden with existing bad loans to small businesses, are unwilling to make new ones. Businesses, unable to receive credit, cannot expand or must downsize. This in turn puts a squeeze [...]

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The February US retail sales data was much stronger than expected, even when taking into account the downward revisions in January.  A picture of a broadening of the recovery is emerging.   Looking at the Jan-Fed period combined, the headline rate rose a combined 0.4% and the market had expected a 0.3% increase, but the real [...]

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Seasonally-adjusted jobless claims dipped 6,000 to 462,000 for the week ending 6 Mar 2010. This is significantly lower than the revised 498,000 number we saw two weeks prior. Nevertheless, 4-week average jobless claims are still over 475,000. This number is actually higher than the previous week’s 470,500 average.

At least we are seeing some incipient [...]

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I hadn’t seen an advance release of the January German export data, when I wrote the following on Tuesday, honest injun I hadn’t:
Well, this is only a hypothesis. But if the hypothesis has any validity we should be able to make some predictions on the basis of it. I would make two. Firstly, since East [...]

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The Bloomberg video is a bit sensationalist in my opinion. But it gets to the heart of the problem in Europe, namely Spain. Spain has an economy and debt which is an order of magnitude larger than Greece. That means that problems in Spain are more critical than in Greece. But it also means that [...]