Remember when you used to hear pundits say “‘Buy and Hold,’ that’s the ticket to shareholder wealth?” Is that really true?
I have put this thesis to the test over a number of years and it just doesn’t hold water. Bear markets are always so extreme, they wipe out gains for decades. So, [...]

Question: Could one see a bubble in housing back in 2005 when house prices were still rising?
Well, to answer that question, I took the S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 10 Index and mapped it the rate of inflation. See, Robert Shiller, one of the Case-Shiller index authors, said in his seminal book Irrational Exuberance [...]

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.

UPDATE: The latest chart on U.S. consumer credit growth is here.
I have been focusing on debt as a primary contributor to the slump the U.S. is experiencing. We’ve seen skyrocketing Debt-to-GDP and Mortgage Debt. Now, I want to look at consumer credit. The Fed releases a monthly statement showing consumer [...]

Although I prefer the S&P/Case-Shiller House Price Index to look at U.S. house prices (see residential property posts), the OFHEO index has more data, going back to 1975 (instead of 1987 as the 10-city Case-Shiller does). Ultimately, they both tell the same story: accelerating declines in house prices in the US. From a [...]

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 [...]

Share

I started tracking an odd statistic that I made up in the aftermath of the last recession called the ‘Mortgage to Growth Gap’ (MGG). At the time, a lot of pundits I respected where saying that American consumers were spending right through the recession in a way that hadn’t happened before. While this [...]

The United States has gone from saving an average of 8-10% of income for decades to zero or negative savings today. If you look at this chart of 12-month rolling average monthly data, it looks like people actually saved more as inflation increased in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, the bottom fell [...]

This chart speaks for itself.
See also:Unemployment Report: biggest rise in rate in two decadesChart of the day: Change in jobless claims

Share