Like it or not, this is where we have been all along and a great many people are just now catching up. No matter what Janet Yellen says about the economy, she is talking out the side of her mouth. Internally, the recovery is gone, and it is never coming back. Externally, we have sub-5% unemployment so we all should [...]
New Home Sales fell sharply in December 2016, from a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 598k in November to 536k. That wasn’t unexpected given the behavior of interest rates since August in particular. It might suggest further declines in new sales as well as construction of new homes in the months ahead. In the bigger picture, interest rates just should not [...]
In 1998, Time Magazine asked Paul Krugman to write up a futuristic piece for the publication’s 100th anniversary issue. Time, pardon the pun, has not been kind to a lot of what he said, but in particular his whimsical predictions for the then-newly expanded internet. The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states [...]
For the first time in three years, oil inventories in the United States are not rising precipitously more than the seasonally expected. At the start of both 2015 and 2016, oil stocks exploded higher as oil prices crashed, all related to the “dollar” flex on the front end of the futures curve creating sufficient contango necessary to strip that oil [...]
The only unequivocally positive aspect to the looming “stimulus” debate is the immense political theater it will generate, and has already generated. Hypocrisy will be standard fare, and in any number of ways. For every Occupy Wall Street Obama supporter who found himself likely for the first time in his life enthusiastically embracing “record high stocks” in 2013 will now [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard Well it's time to get back in the habit of doing this every two weeks. The schedule was interrupted over the holidays and then again by my annual outlook piece. The economic data released over the last two weeks was not particularly inspiring, not that hard data is what has been egging on the old animal spirits. [...]
It has been out of hand for some time, but the longer it goes the further from sense it can get. Today’s news is apparently about a bipartisan effort for $1 trillion in “stimulus”, as if the last $1 trillion in “stimulus” had never happened. Apparently eight years is enough for memories to have been expunged, or as if IRS [...]
The use of weather as an economic excuse, obviously, is meant as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions and factors. The incongruence of the attempt was most egregious in what came to be known as the Polar Vortex of Q1 2014. The weather was unusually cold, to be sure, but that doesn’t account for why so many economic statistics suddenly [...]
From the outside, it appears as if Wall Street operates like a bureaucracy. There is an enormous amount of paperwork, endless committees who conduct endless meetings, and layers of management supposedly managing the movement of that paperwork as well as the meetings of those committees. The idea is simple enough, to make it appear as if there is tremendous weight [...]
As with all innovation, the roots of any specific trend usually cast back a very long time. In terms of Enterprise computing solutions, Software as a Service (SaaS) dates to the earliest days of the internet. In the middle 1990’s Application Service Providers started popping up, but they were largely erased in the dot-com bust (not without good reason). For [...]
Stay In Touch