conceptwizard

Current Recession Now Tied for Longest Since the Great Depression

Maybe we wll break all standing records. Doesnt really matter at this point it will take a long while to work our way out from this mess at this point.

Markets Moving from Depression to Recession

I dont believe what the tell me anymore. I believe what I can see, feel and taste. I see green shoots but someone planted a plastic plant, I feel poor (the opposite of wealthy) and the whole thimg tastes like ....

Economic Data: Good News vs Bad News?

consumers are tapped out. Banks have decreased liimts on credit lines and cards. People are unemployed and losing their homes. where is the money coming from? This spending cant be sustainable.

Investors See 'Green Shoots' in 1Q GDP Manure

I dont have what it takes to invest when reason says otherwise. The numbers just dont tsupport the advance. Good Luck to those who dare, invest careful, and beware!

We’re within shouting distance of a housing market bottom, mortgage-bond pioneer Lewis Ranieri says. "I’m actually very enthusiastic about housing, and I haven’t said that in five years." Ranieri sees a paradigm shift as lower prices enfranchise people who never had the opportunity to own a home.

The admiinistration or banks must be paying him to spread cheer, the numbers dont coincide with ths at all. The banks are sitting on over a half million foreclosues just to keep the prices from falling off a cliff, according to Realtrac.

Obama Administration Lands a Punch, Banks Counterpunch

Should have nationalized them when they had the chance. You need control to make changes. Now they got the taxpayers money and want their freedom to. Noriel Ruobini and others were right.

Weaker than Expected GDP

Who in heir right mnd would think the recession is over without housing on recovery and other leading indicators. I am not buying into that one.

Still-Low Consumer Confidence Improves Significantly

Ok. I'm all fired up. these numbers are nothing to write home to Mom about. Confidence is still low, just not as low this month.

The Deflation That Wasn't

How does a 30% retraction in home pricing factor into this. I guess I sufferd an imaginary loss. How come vehicle prices are 20% lower? Which makes my trade in worth nothing.

Consumer Confidence Is Bouncing

Consumer confidence might be bouncing but youhave to have faith that the consumer knows what they are doing. I am not going to stand in line for a bunch of irresonsible spenders to tell me the market is going up. Any chart from historicals should go back farther than 1979. The line down could go down more.

Great Recession Datapoint of the Day

I agree. All ths and the markets took of like a rocket on the inreased consumer spendig number. It does not seem to matter about housing, employment, losses, sales, exports, deficits, commercial real estate, stress tests, swine flu or wars. The market is going to eat steak. I don't have the confidence to wander around in this storm.

GM Forcing More than 1,000 Dealerships to Close

This cant be good for employment numbers. With the demise of the Pontiac Brand this will likely be the focus on the dealerships closing. Saturn will also account for some of these numbers.

Strongest Two-Month Gain in History for the Fed Index

The GDP numbers just released are not encouraging and will consider review of this position. Investment and inventory and export numbers are not good.

Will Deficit Stimulus Spending Help or Hurt Economic Recovery?

The 92 year old economist Anna Swartz:
Before the monetarist revolution, most economists believed that the quantity of money circulating in the economy had no influence on prices or on growth. History showed otherwise, Friedman and Schwartz argued. Every time the Federal Reserve (and the central banks before it) created an excess of money, either by keeping interest rates too low or by injecting liquidity into banks, prices inflated. At first, the easy money might seem to boost consumers’ purchasing power. But the increase would be only apparent, since sellers tended to raise the prices of their goods to absorb the extra funds. Investors would then start speculating on short-term bets—whether tulips in the seventeenth century or subprime mortgages more recently—seeking to beat the expected inflation. Eventually, such “manias,” as Schwartz calls them, would begin replacing long-term investment, thus destroying entrepreneurship and harming economic growth.

By contrast, by removing excess liquidity, the central bank can cause the sudden collapse of speculative excess, and it can also hurt healthy recovery or growth by constricting the money supply. There is now a near-consensus among economists that lack of liquidity caused the Great Depression.
To rekindle the credit market, the banks must get rid of those toxic assets. That’s why Schwartz supported, in principle, the Bush administration’s first proposal for responding to the crisis—to buy bad assets from banks—though not, she emphasizes, while pricing those assets so generously as to prop up failed institutions. The administration abandoned its plan when it appeared too complicated to price the assets. Bernanke and then–Treasury secretary Henry Paulson subsequently shifted to recapitalizing the banks directly. “Doing so is shifting from trying to save the banking system to trying to save bankers, which is not the same thing,” Schwartz says.

Dr. Bernanke-Love, or: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Fed (Part II)

The fed is not owned by the people it is owned privately by bankers. If you want to trust bankers go ahead but myself I would wear a rubber suit when I am around them and do not pick up the soap!