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Economy

Dr. Pangloss’s Beige Book Evaluation

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Burning_money_pic_7The Beige Book is out and the district by district report on business activity is somewhat dismal.  The good news is that the pace of bad news is not really out of line with what anyone would have expected.  The bad news is that everyone is now just about braced for Armageddon. 

Most districts saw serious declines to sluggish retail activity atbest. Real estate continued to be soft to weakening further, althoughthere were at least some slight gains in loan activity at the expenseof credit quality.  Home prices continued declining in just about alldistricts. Tourism slowed, and declines in employment and compensationare anticipated during 2009.  Factory orders and manufacturingproduction continued to soften.  And if you didn’t guess this one, autosales stank.

One area may offer at least some lightening up of the deflationconcerns after a note that the downward trend in raw materials pricesbegan flattening.

Dr. Pangloss would be telling Candide here that the worst is behind.  The problem is that Dr. Pangloss was wrong time after time before he was finally right.

Jon C. Ogg
January 14, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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