The government wants to regulate your intake of salt because your lousy eating habits will drive up the cost of Obamacare. Salt consumption is anti-social behavior and deserves to be punished.
It is a curious phenomenon that consumers are increasing spending in light of high unemployment and declining wages. How can that be? Have consumers just decided that the recession is over and life will be just like it was before? Where is the money coming from?
The SEC is the Administration's hit squad to find a capitalist to scapegoat for the Great Recession. The found one in Goldman Sachs, the arch-capitalist of our time.
Morgan Stanley closed this deal in June, 2007 at the point when the residential markets were crashing. It defies the imagination why they would at this critical moment raise and commit $8.8 billion to the commercial real estate market. What were they thinking? Hint: fees.
The NBER said Monday that it's too soon to call the recession over, although many of its members think it is. Is it over? Is there a flaw in their analysis?
I am tired of the cheerleading by the mainstream press where they see every positive sign as a sure sign of recovery and every negative sign as "unexpected." Every article I read on new data from the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg is the same--with mind numbing regularity.
Geithner and the Obama Administration are rolling the dice with its China policy in a very high stakes game. They are trying to force China to revalue the yuan. If we crap out, we face the possibility of trade wars and a collapse of international trade. I believe they don't understand what they are doing. This is big. Don't count on politicians to do the right thing.
Today we will be getting the BLS numbers on jobs which everyone says will be great. Will it be good or bad news? The problem is that many of these "jobs" aren't jobs. The needle isn't budging.
The headline should have been "Consumers had to dip into savings to buy the necessities of life: food and clothing." Instead we are given the cheery headline that consumer spending rose for a fifth month. Check out the real story.
Housing is still in trouble, CRE is in worse shape, low inflation is the result of deflationary factors, and at the ground level where most loans are made, credit is still stuck. It's pretty hard to spin the data into a positive.
