A new study of 350 senior corporate executives posted results which look like those of many surveys of American consumers. The recession is not over, and, in fact, will not end until sometime next…
Fed-Head Ben Bernanke is trying to convey that the Federal Reserve can still take action if needed. He is trying to convey a message of more unconventional stimulus, an action path if deflation arises,…
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers released its August report and the consumer will not be pulling the economy out of its current damaged state. The Sentiment Index was 68.9 in the…
The Department of Commerce cut its GDP figure to 1.6% from the previous estimate of 2.4%. The change was due to factors including inventory changes and the strength of imports. The number could have…
New home sales cratered, according to the Commerce Department. The news comes one day after similar news on existing home sales “Sales of new single-family houses in July 2010 were at a seasonally adjusted…
Durable goods orders dropped 3.8% when transportation goods were backed out. Total new orders for manufactured goods rose .3%, less than expected, to $193 billion, according to the Commerce Department. Inventories of manufactured durable…
Credit research company TransUnion said that credit card debt hit an eight-year low in the second quarter of 2010. It is likely to go lower. The average combined debt of those individuals fell to…
The Congressional Budget Office says that in the second quarter the effects of $787 billion package added 1.7% to 4.5% in GDP, cut the unemployment rate by .7 to 1.8 percentage points, and increased…
The Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI Quarterly Economic Forecast predicts that inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) will expand by 2.9 percent in 2010, followed by 2.6 percent growth in 2011. The forecast is down slightly from the…
A city does not die when its last resident moves away. Death happens when municipalities lose the industries and vital populations that made them important cities. The economy has evolved so much since the…
A young Russian woman capably sat my family at an Ocean City, New Jersey restaurant during our recent vacation. A day later I saw the same person working at a souvenir store on the…
There is some silver lining to the relentless clouds of jobless news which included weekly initial unemployment filings which reached a ten month high last week of 500,000 A Bureau of Labor Statistics report…
If you have gone through earnings season and listened to conference calls and read through conference call transcripts in the manner we have and compared the corporate outlooks to economic data, then you will…
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year’s total and $27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected in March…
The economy is dying and the process is accelerating by the day now. The Conference Board released extremely weak data. The Leading Economic Index for the U.S. increased 0.1% in July to 109.8, following…