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Today, the Home Builders Federation came out to ask Mervyn King and the BoE to cut rates 50 beeps. The Telegraph reports:
Housebuilders are urging the Bank of England to cut interest rates when it makes its monthly decision tomorrow, warning that the market is slowing at a faster rate than it did during the [...]

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Global financial institutions are deleveraging because they can’t build enough equity capital any other way except by going to Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, cap in hand. So, the Fed and the Bank of England (BoE) have both cut interest rates. Yet, LIBOR remains stubbornly high. The TED spread is [...]

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The term deleveraging is one bandied about a lot in the press recently. But, what does it actually mean? De-leveraging is the process by which financial institutions and investors reduce the relative size of their assets to equity ratio. Generally, it means shedding assets in the financial sector, thus reducing credit and [...]

I don’t trust the U.S. government’s inflation number for measuring real GDP. The annual rate of inflation in this measurement is only 2.2%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is running at a 4.0% clip. That’s as large a differential as you’ll see between two government inflation statistics.

The GDP number was revised upwards from 0.6% growth to 0.9% growth. However, what is most interesting is the GDP implicit price deflator. This is the index number the BEA uses to get from nominal GDP to real GDP, the inflation-adjusted number everyone hears on TV and in the news. Nominal GDP was up only 3.5%. So what is your guess about the inflation number the BEA used to get the 0.9% growth number you hear on TV? 3% inflation, 4% inflation?

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When looking at the 20 biggest markets in the US, home prices have risen at a rate far above the rate of inflation since Jan. 2000. Prices would need to fall 26% nationally to move back to the trendline.

However, looking at the 10 biggest markets, using data back to 1987, the inflation trendline shows that [...]

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George Soros talked to the Telegraph, and in an article released today, sounded very downbeat about the prospects for the UK economy. M. Soros also said that their were many fundamental supports for the price of oil, including supply ad denand as well as inflation arguments. But ultimately speculative fervour has driven the [...]

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The inflation genie may be out of the bottle for a while. The headlines are being made by food and energy prices spiking higher. The Fed and many economists ignore food and energy when looking to underlying inflationary trends, relying instead on core inflation to signal the direction of prices. To date, core [...]

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Steve Hanke, a libertarian economist who writes for Forbes, argues that the Fed is panicked about the economy in a piece that came out today. He believes they have lowered the Fed Funds interest rate to where inflation is now a problem. His suggestion: buy gold! (read article here)
He is right. The [...]