Archive - Mar 2012 - Blog entry

Another deal gets dissolved. But threats abound. And it's only going to get worse.

Reflections from the top. 

Although not quite there yet, it will soon be time to go shopping...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Maiden Lane to be reborn?

Everything worked...

Housing is improving! Housing is improving! Housing is improving!

if I say it enough will someone believe it?

This post has a link to a Bloomberg story about a revival in Seattle where house bidding wars are in progress: Date March 27, 2012. You won't believe it. It reads like a story from the heart of the days of the bubble market.

Dylan Ratigan, Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Van Jones: Superstar Lineup Tackles Financial Crisis and Congressional Collusion. An unprecedented live-streaming event March 27th 7pm EST brings together some of the hottest critics of our political and economic system.

All you need to read and some more.

How to get rid of unwanted pests?

And Number 2 Reactor Running Out of Water ...

The Fed is clearly worried about the economy. Ben Bernanke's latest speeches aren't exactly inspiring. It is as if he thinks the rosy(ier) numbers are some prank being played upon him by the gods; that soon this will all be taken away. He is right. He admits he doesn't understand why the economy is the way it is. Reality doesn't fit his theory. ("It's supposed to work, dammit!") So, what do you do when you are the head of the world's biggest printing press, and don't know what else to do? Why QE3 of course.

Spain, Europe, China - The Generational Opportunity to get hit head on by a Black Swan

Sarkozy is grasping at straws ... and created a new classification of people in France and maybe even in the whole entire world.

Bernanke’s argument that he can push demand harder to reduce unemployment is based on the notion that unemployment is more cyclical than structural. Unfortunately that seems like a bad bet given the evidence. The greatest bulge in unemployment in this cycle is from not-temporary unemployment instead of from temporary unemployment. And that category’s contribution to the unemployment rate is larger than in this expansion at this point than in any previous expansion at the 32-month mark since at least the 1970s. Ben seems to be rolling the dice on a bad bet. But it’s a bet that gives him a rationale for postponing tightening which is what his Great Depression lesson tells him to do. Right now all we really know is the ‘what’ of his policy ‘not the ‘why.’

Taking Bernanke’s statement to indicate that QE is coming in April is wishful thinking at best. Bernanke’s actual words imply, if anything, that the Fed may have failed to fix the US economy. This is more of the Fed playing damage control because the reality is that Bernanke is well aware of this:  by the Fed’s own data we’re clearly in a structural Depression, NOT a cyclical recession.