Black Friday to the rescue — but at what cost?
US equity markets are nearly as excited about Black Friday as these shoppers:Retail surveys all point to above-expectations spending over the so-called “first weekend...
Supercommittee: oh, drag
Last week FT Alphaville listed some of the items that would affect how much fiscal drag the US economy would confront in the next couple of years.In light of the US budget Supercommittee’s...
Non-farm payrolls climbed 80k in October, unemployment falls to 9 per cent
An 80,000 rise in non-farm payrolls is disappointing, but something exorcised the devil from the report’s underlying details, which were better than hoped.There were big...
US consumer “confidence” at recessionary levels
A list of antonyms for “confidence”: “uncertainty”, “disbelief”, “carefulness”, “caution”, “circumspection”,...
Great Stagnations from the archives
It’s unwise to hear the ghosts of history in just one or two echoes of the present.Which is just an overwrought our way of saying that it’s important to search beyond...
Increasing Macroeconomic Fright
Title of the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, September 2010:Recovery, Risk & RebalancingThe title of the September 2011 edition (just out at pixel time)…Slowing Growth,...
Fiscal flailing
We’re late to this, but here’s a nifty chart from Goldman showing the expected fiscal drag on the US economy through next year, adjusted for the range of potential...
Fiscal flailing
We’re late to this, but here’s a nifty chart from Goldman showing the expected fiscal drag on the US economy through next year, adjusted for the range of potential...
El-Erian: Interpreting Bernanke’s Jackson Hole speech
Mohamed El-Erian , chief executive and co-chief investment officer at PIMCO, responds to the Federal Reserve chairman’s speech at the Jackson Hole conference. ______Chairman...
Struggling back to neutral, (monetary) policy edition
Ezra Klein has offered a name for the current situation that’s not nearly as sexy as the ones we came up with, but which is reasonable enough:If it were up to me, we would...
Reality, bites
Introducing the debt ceiling relief rally:That’s the seventh daily decline in a row for the S&P 500, placing it in negative negative territory for the year.
