Good day, and welcome to another week. Chuck finally made it back home last night, after speaking at two different conferences last week down in Florida. We had a pretty wicked night of thunderstorms last night, so I’m sure Chuck’s flight wasn’t exactly smooth. Sure hope he got over that stomach thing that he had on Friday.
[Read more...]Jobs Data Push Speculators Out of the Market
May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Good day, and welcome to another week. Chuck finally made it back home last night, after speaking at two different conferences last week down in Florida. We had a pretty wicked night of thunderstorms last night, so I’m sure Chuck’s flight wasn’t exactly smooth. Sure hope he got over that stomach thing that he had on Friday.
[Read more...]How Employment and Economic Growth are Hindered by Politics
April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Nothing special in yesterday’s financial news. So let’s turn from farce to fraud…that is, to politics.
President Obama has to defend his policies, pretending that they have brought a real recovery. One of the pillars of his case, say the papers, is that unemployment has gone down.
[Read more...]Unpopular Cures for Unemployment and Economic Depression
December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
So far, so good.
Things keep happening, more or less as they should.
That is, the US and European economies keep falling apart. And the fixers keep failing to put them back together again.
Just as we expected.
Trying to fix a depression it is not only expensive…. The US government spends $1.60 for every $1 it receives in taxes. This is a recipe for a disaster, not for a recovery.
[Read more...]Giving Up on the Economic Recovery
July 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The fight for recovery is over. The feds have waved the white flag. Maybe…
The Labor Department came out with the latest employment numbers last week. They were atrocious. Only about a fifth as many new jobs as economists expected. Which shows you three things.
First, economists can’t really predict levels of employment, growth, prices, or anything else. And they are especially bad at it when they have the wrong idea of how things work.
[Read more...]US Dollar Reverses Losses After Jobs Report
July 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Well… Friday was quite interesting with the Jobs Jamboree falling flat on its face, and watching the dollar get sold…and then bought again as the day went on… The dollar holds the hammer again this morning, as now the media and market observers are going after Italy… So the offset to the dollar, the euro (EUR), is slip-sliding away… Slip-sliding away, the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-sliding away…
[Read more...]The Continuing Delusion of Economic Recovery
July 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
“The people will be crushed under the burden of taxes,
loan after loan will be floated; after having drained the
present, the State will devour the future.”
– Frédéric Bastiat, French libertarian economist, 1850
Stocks managed to eek out a bit of a rally yesterday. The Dow was up nearly 100 points by the session’s close. (Approximately equal to the amount it gave back within the first sixty seconds of trading today.) Gold, meanwhile, is up $8 over the past 24 hours. An ounce this morning goes for just over $1,540. And bitcoins…they’re back to $14.50 a piece. Hmmm…
[Read more...]The Successful Failure of US Money Printing
May 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Dow down again – 25 points. Gold up again, $7. And oil still below $100.
Inflation worries up, in other words.
Economy down.
And now it’s official. QE2 is a FLOP! See below…
To hear the papers tell it, US stocks are being weighed down by troubles in Europe. Here’s the report from The New York Times:
[Read more...]
Where Do Real Jobs Come From?
The pentagon goes rogue…
“Jobs engine sputters again in April,” reports the weekend Wall Street Journal.
What kind of humbug recovery is this? Bloomberg adds:
Estimates for the jobless rate, derived from a separate survey of households, ranged from 8.1 percent to 8.3 percent. Unemployment has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, the longest such stretch since monthly records began in 1948.
[Read more...]