Barbara can have her upbeat housing statistics. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis delivered a downer today, revising its estimate of third-quarter GDP growth from 3.5% to 2.8%. The revision was primarily due, the BEA said, to
an upward revision to imports and downward revisions to personal consumption expenditures and
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We were at a cocktail party, and [former Apple CEO] Gil Amelio was explaining Apple’s predicament to us, and he said: “Apple is a boat. There’s a hole in the boat, and it’s taking on water. But there’s also a treasure on board. And the problem is, everyone on board is rowing in different directions, so the boat is just standing
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My column this week is a brief foray into the world of the market wave and cycle theorists (mainly Elliott Wave guy Bob Prechter). I’ll put up some relevant links later, but right now I’ve got to run.
Sorry for the lack of posting. To make amends, here’s a little motivational video for all of you:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4_NzRz4kd8]
So I’m riding into Louisville from the airport this morning (I was in town to give a speech to the local CFAs), and I asked my host about the local economy. He reeled off a few employers and then said, “health care, health care’s really big here.”
Funny thing: I was in Winston-Salem a couple of months ago and heard the same thing. My …
I’ve written a piece for TIME.com that’s headlined U.S.-China Trade: Prepare for Continued Imbalance. Which pretty much explains what it’s about.
In today’s WSJ, Nick Wingfield addresses one of the stranger information-technology developments of the past decade. The off-the-shelf computing technology available to anybody with a few bucks to spend (and in some cases without any bucks, as some of the best stuff is free) is significantly better than what large corporations provide …
Here’s the kind of interesting stuff you can learn reading this morning’s monthly foreign trade report from the Census Bureau:
Overall U.S. trade deficit for September: $36.5 billion
Trade deficit in petroleum products: $20.5 billion
Trade deficit with China: $22.1 billion
Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius writes that bad times among small businesses, which are harder for government statisticians to measure than the doings of big businesses, probably means the economy is growing slower than the feds say it is:
We have argued that the weakness of the small business sector may mean that real GDP in the
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The Wine Economist reports that Australia’s overproduction of wine has reached a crisis point:
Australia has an accumulated surplus of 100 million cases of wine that will double in the next two years if current trends continue, according to the report. The annual surplus is huge – equal to all UK export sales and there is no clear
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The news that AIG CEO Robert Benmosche is thinking of leaving (now he says he’s staying; see update below) because he’s sick of dealing with those mean, mean federal regulators—especially the ones who want to cap his and his employees’ pay—raised two conflicting thoughts:
1) The federal government isn’t very good at running …
BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who you’d have to say has emerged as one of the winners from the financial crisis, says we shouldn’t worry all too much about too-big-to-fail financial firms staying too big to fail. That’s because the feds are already shrinking them. “They are doing that by reducing leverage,” he said at a breakfast put on by the …
