America's Economic Future – A Discussion By Ted Kavadas
This post is the latest update to a series of blog posts seen on the CalculatedRisk.com blog. The original blog post of April 12, 2010, is titled “Recession Measures.” In it, Bill discussed key measures that the NBER uses to determine recoveries, and posted four charts. Here are those charts, updated in his August 2, 2011 post. The charts …
On July 21, Gallup released a poll titled “U.S. Economic Confidence Sinks to Lowest Level Since March ’09.” A few notable excerpts: Americans’ economic confidence plunged last week to its lowest weekly level since March 2009. Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index fell to -41 in the week ending July 17 — down from -34 the prior …
I find the following charts to be disturbing. These charts would be disturbing at any point in the economic cycle; that they depict such a tenuous situation now – 24 months after the official (as per the 9-20-10 NBER announcement) June 2009 end of the recession – is especially notable. These charts raise a lot …
This Time Is Different (2009) by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff is a widely-quoted and referenced book. Often it is referred to as “the Reinhart and Rogoff book.” I find the book to be interesting and unique, although I don’t agree with some of its contents. From an overall standpoint, perhaps the greatest misgiving I …
Previously I have written of the financial difficulties of states. Of particular interest, for a variety of reasons, is the precarious situation in Illinois, of which I wrote of in the January 19 post (“Financial Situation Facing Illinois“) The Wall Street Journal had a June 9 editorial titled “Illinois Tax Firesale” which contained the following …
On Wednesday, June 8, The Wall Street Journal had a story titled “Faded Malls Leave Cities In the Lurch.” Some notable excerpts: Sales taxes are a critical source of funding for many cities, typically second in size only to property taxes. They accounted for roughly 23% of all U.S. state and local tax collection in …
The following chart is from the CalculatedRisk blog post of June 9, 2011, titled “Q1 Flow of Funds: Household Real Estate assets off $6.6 trillion from peak.” It depicts Total Household Net Worth as a Percent of GDP. The underlying data is from The Federal Reserve Flow of Funds 1Q 2011 report: (click on chart to …
Here are four charts reflecting confidence survey readings. These are from the SentimenTrader.com site. I find these charts valuable as they provide a long-term history of each survey, which is rare. Each survey chart is plotted in blue, below the S&P500: (click on each chart to enlarge image) Conference Board Consumer Confidence, last updated 5-30-11: – …
Recently a NBER Working Paper (#17072) was released titled “Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications.” There are various notable statistics and findings in the paper. From the abstract: This paper examines households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days. Using data from the 2009 TNS Global Economic …
I found various notable items in Walmart’s Q1 conference call transcript (pdf) dated May 17, 2011. I view Walmart’s results as particularly noteworthy given their retail prominence and focus on low prices. I have previously commented on their quarterly results. Here are various excerpts that I find most notable: comments from Mike Duke, from page 7: “Despite improvements in …