Archive for May, 2009

Saturday night’s agreement between a significant group of GM’s creditors, the company, and the US government has sealed the deal: GM will file for bankruptcy, most likely Monday.  Thus ends an iconic chapter in American history.  GM once was emblematic of American manufacturing prowess.  It generated a full 3% of the country’s GDP back in… »

The plummet is now more of a sharp fall.
That’s the best way to describe the way the economy is now behaving.  This morning’s release of the revised first quarter 2009 GDP data has it declining at ‘only’ an annual rate of 5.7%.  The original estimate, made last month without some of the final data, had… »

Lost in all the hubbub about the losses and possible collapse of our largest banks – most of the fuss has been about only the 19 largest banks in the country – is the ongoing crisis that the small, local, banks are facing.  So it is worth taking note of what’s going on at the… »

As we move more into the legislative agenda of the Obama administration, rather than the triage period of economic recovery, several inter-related issues become very prominent.  Obama wants to shift the emphasis of health care towards universal coverage, but has to accomplish this against a very strong headwind: the Reagan/Bush legacy of national debt.
The problem… »

The news from GM is either grim or encouraging depending upon your point of view regarding the efficacy of bankruptcy.  If you till cling to the vision of GM’s importance and value to the overall US economy then its impending demise and re-emergence as a much diminished business will be grim indeed.  If you are… »

We all know the housing bubble, and the policies that enabled it, are a prime cause of the current crisis.  So watching every bit of housing data has become something of an obsession. The problem with this, of course, is that month-to-month changes are notoriously inaccurate guides as to the underlying direction of any economic… »

This morning brings more data to support the notion that the worst is behind us.  But along with it is evidence of the long road ahead.  In other words a typical day for this point in a recession.

First the good news: consumer confidence, as measured by the Conference Board, jumped quite strongly last month and is… »