Share
This is an update on trade and protectionism because the last posts I wrote on protectionism were in December. Since then, the only two major events on the protectionist front happened last Friday.
Canada and the Buy American Fiasco
The National Post of Canada trumpeted Protectionism ‘breakthrough’ reached on Friday because Canada received an exclusion to the [...]

Share
John Mauldin’s latest is about spotting asset bubbles and the potential government policy response. But he also has a lot to say about the latest employment situation survey and the situation in Greece with an apt comparison to the U.S.
In this issue: A Bubble in Search of a Pin [...]

Share
Last week I showed you a chart from ProPublica in my post State unemployment insurance insolvency: 50 little Hoovers which demonstrated how states are being killed by the financial strains of unemployment insurance.  Well, this week ProPublica is back with more detail behind that chart – and, as you can imagine, it’s not exactly bullish.
They [...]

Share
Marc Chandler, Global Head of Currency Strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman has an alarming note out this morning on economic policy.  I take notice because Chandler usually writes in more nuanced and non-apocalyptic tones.  For example, he begins:
The risks are asymmetrical.  Many of the world’s national economies, in various stages of recovery, are still highly [...]

Share
A lot of people are questioning the unemployment rate of 9.7% in the face of a –20,000 non-farm payroll print.  How could we be losing jobs and have the unemployment rate drop? It would seem people are dropping out of the labor force.
However, I have now parsed the household survey data and most of [...]

Share
Those are the numbers. But this month’s unemployment rate and the non-farm payrolls number are less important this go round. The devil is in the details here because we have some major benchmark revisions and that means changes to historical data.  Bloomberg has a report out which says the government’s own statisticians have anticipated a [...]

Share
Xie believes the Chinese economy is in no near-term threat. But he does see problems down the line because of a property bubble. He recommends even more monetary tightening to reduce the ill effects of this bubble.
Xie comments on the U.S. and on Europe as well. The video of his comments runs just under ten [...]

Share
This past Monday I was on the BBC talking about the recently unveiled Fiscal Year 2011 Budget proposed by the Obama Administration for the U.S. Federal Government.  The budget is, as with most things Obama, a tightrope walk between the two ends of the political spectrum.  On the one hand, the President wants to be [...]

Share
This morning, I left just in time to see the U.S. Department of Labor’s jobless claims numbers for the preceding week.  They were not good.  Initial claims hit 480,000 for the week ending 30 Jan 2010, pushing the 4-week average up to 468,750. 

 
As a result of this news and sovereign debt issues in [...]

Share
This map comes via Gallup. The jobs picture is worst in the west and best in the south.

See Gallup’s analysis of the data at the link below:
Source
In January, Most Job Creation in U.S. South and East – Gallup