Archive - Nov 16, 2009

• Retail sales ex-autos at 0.2%, miss expectations of 0.4%, huge downward September revision (AP)
• Evans-Pritchard: China has now become the biggest risk to the world economy (Telegraph)
• Remember Europe? Greek bonds decline, spread with bunds widest in four months (Bloomberg)
• NY $10 billion budget gap looms as lawmakers returns to Albany (Bloomberg)
• Obama talks human rights, censorship with Chinese students but event is not broadcast nationally (ABC)
• GM reports $1.2 billion loss, generates $3.3 billion in cash
  courtesy of CfC and other subdisides that keep it out of liquidation,
  threatens to pay back government loan back with more government money (Bloomberg)

• APEC leaders back China's anti-protectionist stance, avoid currency debate.
• Asia stocks, currencies rise on APEC pledge to continue stimulus; Dollar drops.
• Euro gains a second day as recovery signs boost demand for risk.
• Japan’s GDP in Q3 rises 4.8% - higher than expectations, on rebound in domestic demand.

This is a reposting of part on of an article I published on my blog in October of 2007, over two years ago. Enjoy!

The land recession, as foretold over two years ago, the Reggie Middleton CRE short list - round two, and the macro argument behind why most pundits are actually still too optimistic regarding CRE

On September 30, 2008, the Treasury issued an edict innocuously titled "Notice 2008-83," published in the equally innocuously titled "Internal Revenue Bulletin 2008-42." Perhaps it is just our paranoid side, but we suspect you could return the country to the gold standard in "Internal Revenue Bulletin 2009-63" and no one would catch on for 6 months. Add to this the fact that Congress, and the rest of the planet, was already quite literally possessed by the upcoming vote on Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (the underpinnings of what would later become the Troubled Assets Relief Program or "TARP") and it isn't hard to see why the "notice" went, ironically, somewhat unnoticed.

It shouldn't have.

"It wasn't a bow, exactly. But Mr. Clinton came close. He inclined his head and shoulders forward, he pressed his hands together. It lasted no longer than a snapshot, but the image on the South Lawn was indelible: an obsequent President, and the Emperor of Japan."