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Well, it isn’t only my German economy Q4 call, or my Japanese economy one which look OK right now, this Italian one also now seems very much to the point.
In fact, as I suspected it might, the Italian economy went back into contraction mode in the last three months of 2009.
Italy’s economy shrank by 0.2 [...]

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New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declared a “fiscal emergency” for the state of New Jersey today, announcing massive cuts to schools and hospitals.  The issue is less the budget for this year, which itself shows a deficit of $2.2 billion, but rather next year’s projected shortfall of some $11 billion. On a per capita basis [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s Latvian GDP numbers we now have news that Estonia’s economy shrank at the slowest annual pace in a year at the end of 2009 as a modest recovery in exports and one-time stock-building helped offset the impact of the continuing [...]

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The past week saw a huge fall in the number of persons making an initial filing for jobless claims. The U.S. Department of Labor reported:
In the week ending Feb. 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 440,000, a decrease of 43,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 483,000. The 4-week moving [...]

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The Atlantic has an epic piece on employment trends in America in this month’s issue.  This is a must-read piece of journalism, not just for the anecdotes and analysis of this particular downturn, but also for its statistics and historical perspective. 
One particular part of the narrative on urban Black males caught my eye. You’ll [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
Well, as we say in English, it never rains but it pours. Latvia, which has had the deepest recession of all 27 European Union member states, contracted by nearly 18 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009, when compared to the same period a year [...]

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This is how Stephen Roach describes the economy despite the largest monetary and stimulus in global history. Below is a TV interview Roach recently did on CNBC TV-18 as a video in two parts with the linked transcript at the bottom.  Roach says that historical precedent demonstrates recessions precipitated by large private sector debt burdens [...]

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No he didn’t. 
Jim Rogers, the bow-tie wearing Quantum Fund co-founder and Sino-enthusiast, has recently implied Jim Chanos doesn’t know China from a hole in the ground. Rogers is not happy about the recent bearish pronouncements coming from Enron-slayer and famed short-seller Jim Chanos.  In what looks to be a rumble in the jungle of  [...]

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I first featured some commentary by Fred Sheehan in November on a muni post The coming collapse of the municipal bond market. Now Fred is back and he’s on the radio, talking with Jim Puplava about Sir Alan Greenspan this time.  It will give you a better view of Greenspan, the man, than some of [...]

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A while back I wrote a post called A populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle that used a passage from Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel on kleptocracy as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion about wealth distribution. The overall gist was that almost all societies have unequal distributions of income [...]