That’s what Sir Howard Davies, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England (BoE), has to say.

The U.S. Department of Labor just released the weekly report for unemployment insurance claims. Initial claims were 384,000, while continuing claims rose to 3.139 million. The 4-week average moved up to 3,099,250. This is 593,000 more than one year ago. Below is the chart for the last two years of continuing [...]

Barry Ritholtz at the Big Picture is on to something. He has found A Perfect Recession Indicator. Since 1953, when year-over-year Non-Farm payrolls have gone negative, there has been a recession. This happened nine out of nine times for a perfect score! (I actually looked at the data from 1939 and [...]

The U.S. economy is losing jobs fast. I will have more to say about this later, but I wanted to get out a link to Bloomberg’s coverage of the 8:30 unemployment report. There’s also a link to the report under the “Economic Data” section in my sidebar. Here’s what Bloomberg said:
“The U.S. [...]

John Mauldin is an economic pundit I have been following for a number of years. He not only writes a weekly newsletter that is very informative but he also has many guest writers of equal note. Yesterday, he had Michael Levitt of HCM write for him and what he said about the U.S. [...]

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 [...]

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 was just reviewing the Case-Shiller local metropolitan indices and saw that as the decline gets steeper, each of the 20 markets is reverting back to price levels 3 and 4 years in the past. So, here’s what I have on each metro area as of March 2008.
You last saw these prices in:
1. AZ-Phoenix——–March [...]

Remember when Paul Wolfowitz admitted in 2003 almost five years ago to the day that there never were any weapons of mass destruction? The Bush Administration had decided to use the WMD rationale ‘for bureaucratic reasons.’ He said, For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it [...]

The S and P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index for the U.S. housing market came out yesterday and the news was not good. MarketWatch said:

Home prices in 20 major U.S. metropolitan areas have dropped a record 14.4% in the past year, Standard & Poor’s said Tuesday.

The 20-city Case-Shiller home price index fell 2.2% from [...]