Now at his buy-side Canadian shop Gluskin Sheff, former Merrill Lynch chief North American economist David Rosenberg is sounding as bearish as ever.  He sees the recent market rally as a bear market rally and envisages a re-testing of March 2009 lows.  He also fails to see a recovery.  After all, one can have a [...]

I’m back after a brief hiatus.  I would like to present you with some data on jobless claims, an economic data series that will become increasingly important in the weeks and months ahead.  The data suggest that a recovery is imminent. This should come as no surprise as everyone is jumping on the [...]

Now that everyone is talking about green shoots and the potential for economic recovery, I thought I would run through the statistics of U.S. GDP with you.  The reason I am bringing this up is that there is a lot of confusion about what recovery means and positive GDP growth mean.  So, I am going [...]

Richard Bernstein asks a very good question in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg.  Now that the so-called green shoots are dominating the news coverage and the S&P 500 is up a massive 34% from its March lows, one might think we are due for a pretty Robust V-shaped recovery.  Is that what the future holds?
Bernstein [...]

I am watching Bernanke at the congressional hearing.  You can see his prepared testimony at CR here.  But, the general take on what he is saying is that the economy has reached its worst rate of decline and should improve steadily until it actually recovers later this year.  He also says that major impediments remain, [...]

For most of the last few years, I have been labeled a perma-bear, that is someone who looks at the situation from a reflexively skeptical glass half-empty bias. One only need peruse our archives to get that impression. In fact, that is hardly the case. Over the past few months, as the evidence of a [...]

I have done my part over the past few weeks to write that I thought jobless claims signaled the potential for recovery. I started the drumbeat in late March. Here are the posts:

I last posted on Thursday before the Easter Holidays in two posts very much at odds with one another. The overall thrust of the first post was that the financial services industry in the United States was due to gain from some very advantageous circumstances in 2009. Meanwhile, the later re-post pointed out the continued fragility of the U.S. economy and banking system and focused on liquidity and solvency as unresolved issues. I would like to bring these two posts together here because I believe the concept behind the dichotomy is best described as the Fake Recovery.

I believe we may be seeing the bottom here. Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman does as well. Here is what he has to say:
Our baseline expectation is that the pace of contraction of the US economy probably peaked in the horrific fourth quarter of last year, which still appears subject to downward [...]