I’d say that the UK is looking a lot like the U.S. looked a year or so ago, with high consumer debt loads and high property prices. What’s the likelihood of recession. A near certainty.
“Over to the strategy team at Legal and General. They’ve charted a ‘heat map’ of factors that could push us [...]

A leading Spansh newspaper, ABC, reported today that Spanish growth is decelerating quickly. According to the paper, year-on-year growth slowed from 3.5% to 2.7% while quarter-on-quarter, growth was only 0.3% versus 0.8% in the previous quarter.
The article goes on to say that construction spending has been hampering both growth and employment as housing has [...]

The U.S. has been flashing red regarding recession for some time despite the naysayers.First, let me define recession because you usually hear that it’s two consecutive quarters of a decline in real GDP. Not exactly. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the official arbiter of recessions says:
The NBER does not define a [...]

That’s the title of a UK Telegraph article on a report showing that UK repossession orders have increased to levels not seen since the housing bust of the early 1990s. According to this morning’s BBC 5 Live program, “Wake Up To Money,” the government claim that only a third of these repossession orders actually [...]

Spain is perhaps the next domino in the global credit bubble to fall. The UK economy is slowing as well, but the pace of slowing in Spain is truly remarkable.
According to Spanish-language news reports I have seen today (see Round-up), Spain is being hit with a housing bust that has led to increasing unemployment [...]

As with the GDP numbers last week, the employment numbers were very dubious indeed. The headline number was still a loss of 20,000 jobs. However, the detail point to likely revisions much beyond that number when more exact data have been compiled in the future.
Four SectorsFrom Mish Shedlock’s blog, one can see 4 [...]

This weekend I received a disturbing newsletter from John Mauldin, provacatively entitled ” Lies and Other Statistics,” that dissected the GDP numbers where the headline number was +0.6%. Digging into the detail reveals a completely different picture altogether.
We are in recessionIt is in the best interest of the U.S. Federal Government to paint a [...]

There was heavy overbuilding in Spain as the global housing bubble caught fir there these past years. Now, Spain’s bubble has burst and it is having dire economic consequences. The Spanish National Statistics Office released the most recent unemployment figures showing an enormous jump from 8.6% to 9.6% in one month, the largest [...]

The banking crisis in the U.S. is taking on a significant turn for the worse as banks tighten the screws on consumers. With banks facing record writedowns to their equity capital, they are looking to limit their exposure to the mortgage market. The latest salvo in this battle is banks terminating unused lines [...]

I have been in Europe for a while and am back at blogging after a two-week hiatus. This morning I was listening to “Wake Up To Money,” a British finance show that one can hear via podcast. The gist of the discussion was that the UK economy is slowing markedly with consumers really [...]