Gas stations might want to think about offering direct deposit. On Wednesday, the government announced the monthly number for retail spending and it included a disturbing figure for those of us who have been hoping for a strong recovery. Excluding gas purchases, consumers spent just 0.1% more in March than they did a month ago. [...]
Most people seemed to agree that the narrowly avoided government shutdown would have hurt the economy. But the question is whether the budget deal struck to avert the shutdown will hurt the economy more than if Washington had just turned off the lights? The budget deal struck by President Obama and John Boehner and other [...]
I spent this past weekend up in Bretton Woods at the INET conference, a shin dig put on by the George Soros funded Institution for New Economic Thinking, which is a group dedicated to figuring out new and better ways to run the global economy. You may have seen the outrage over the conference on [...]
Last week’s budget wrangles in Washington remind me of reality TV. You watch it like you watch a train wreck. While Republicans and Democrats have (temporarily) avoided shutting down the federal government, you almost wish they wouldn’t have. At least then, they would have been forced to confront the economic consequences of their own political [...]
A government shut down could cause consumer spending to drop by just over $30 billion. It’s a lot of money. And certainly meaningful to the people who count on those checks. But the real question is this: Is that enough to derail the economic recovery, or at least delay it? The spending hit has to [...]
Central banker see. Central Banker do? We will see. On Thursday, the European Central Bank for the first time in nearly three years raised interest rates. Even though the rate is only going from 1% to 1.25%, it’s a significant move because the ECB becomes the first central bank among so-called wealthy nations to raise [...]
Costco. Victoria’s Secret. Wet Seal. Saks. Kohl’s. That’s as varied a group of stores you can get. Yet, all four giant retail chains reported that in March their sales were better than expected. Some of the chains’ sales were far better than expected. For example, analysts had expected sales at Costco’s outlets open at least [...]
It came as no surprise to anyone following the ongoing euro zone debt crisis that Portugal on Wednesday finally asked the European Union for a bailout. Pressure on the country’s beleaguered leadership had been intensifying for weeks, as it became harder and harder for the cash-strapped government to raise money on international markets at an [...]
Wall Street and Washington haven’t been getting along for a while. So perhaps it isn’t a surprise that the stock market seems somewhere between indifferent and gleeful at the prospect of a possible government shutdown. Stocks are up today, even as the likelihood of a government shutdown seems to have climbed from [...]
Yesterday in this space, I asked if investors would come to reassess the riskiness of developed economies and usher in a “sea change” in how money is allocated around the world. Could Japan, the most indebted of all industrialized countries, be the trigger to start that dramatic process? Since the devastating earthquake and tsunami that [...]
