Housing Market Near Bottom – Have We Heard This Before? This time for sure. The long awaited bottom of the housing market is finally at hand. Never mind the fact that there remains a massive foreclosure overhang and there is still a consistent sense of despair when the consumer is polled about their job prospects [...]
North Korea has suddenly asked to get new international talks engaged to end the standoff with foreign powers over its nuclear ambitions. This “about face” struck us as odd, so we did some digging and found some intelligence from the AFP from an aid worker that has just left the country – suggesting that the [...]
The UN has issued a warning to the global community regarding drought conditions near the horn of Africa. Africa is not new to drought and famine conditions – in fact, unfortunately the world can get immune to the various stages of famine in the country. But this time could be very different. According to the [...]
When does a realistic warning become doomsaying? When does an assessment of alternatives and contingencies turn into a series of self-fulfilling prophecies? When does the media make matters worse with its penchant for covering those who have the most outlandish and dramatic commentaries? [This content is for MEMBERS ONLY. Please Subscribe to continue.]
Russia has set a deadline of midnight on Wednesday to get a payment from Belarus of about $53 million in order to keep Russia from shutting off electricity to the country. That is the amount that Russia is owed in back payments for previous power used. According to Russian officials, this threat is the only [...]
It would be nice to assert that there was some suspense involved in this decision but the reality is that there was never much doubt that Cristine Lagarde would become the next head of the IMF once the Europeans united behind her. The US tried to maintain the illusion of choice by waiting until the [...]
The origin of the financial meltdown will be discussed for generations and there will endless commentaries on root causes and the actions that triggered the worst of the decline but few can argue that what might have been a mild and restrained recession roared out of control when the biggest banks all seemed to crater [...]
Andy Rubin, the head of the Android smartphone operating system at Google, announced that the company is activating 500,000 Android smartphones each day. Perhaps even more impressively, the activations are growing at over 4% per week. At that pace Google will activate over 200 million Android smartphones this year. If the growth rate continues, within [...]
We wanted to introduce an index that is fairly new to the Federal Reserve, just a couple of years old since being released (but financial comparisons going back to pre-recession periods). The index measures 18 key components of the broader economy in what it calls the factors that drive financial stress. The chart at the [...]
We went out on a limb recently telling you that the third quarter of the year is going to be a robust one for the US economy – hopefully spilling over into the fourth quarter. We continue to talk about the coming transportation challenges that will happen because of such strong activity in the July, [...]
