America's Economic Future – A Discussion By Ted Kavadas
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 …
In the October 27, 2010 blog post (“Market Overview – Part V: Stock Market”) I showed two charts of the S&P500. As we are now approaching various important technical levels of the S&P500, I have updated one of the charts, as seen below: chart courtesy of StockCharts.com; annotations by the author click on chart to …
I am currently finding a variety of charts and market indicators to be of great interest as they depict internal stock market dynamics that are either less-than-robust or disconcerting / alarming. One such chart, which I have previously featured, is that of the NYSE Summation Index. I have put in the S&P500 as an overlay …
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 …
The June Wall Street Journal Economic Forecast Survey was published June 13, 2011. The headline is “Sluggish Hiring Seen as a Threat to Recovery.” I found various aspects of the survey to be interesting. One was “On average, the economists put the chances of a double-dip recession in the next year at just 16%, but …
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 …
From time to time I post quotes from others regarding Ben Bernanke. Here is one from this week’s Barron’s (June 4) “Mailbag” section. It is a quote from J. Eftin Frenett. While I don’t necessarily agree with (all of) it, I thought it was an interesting perspective and one that deserves contemplation: To the …
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 …
On June 2, Janet Yellen, Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, gave a speech titled “Assessing Potential Financial Imbalances in an Era of Accomodative Monetary Policy” (pdf) While I don’t agree with many of her points and assertions, I nonetheless think the topic is very important. As such, here are …
On March 1 I wrote a post titled “The Stock Market Bubble – Various Aspects.” In that post I highlighted a variety of factors that support my conclusion that the entire stock market is experiencing a bubble. One of the factors listed was “Extremely rapid valuation increases seen in a variety of private (tech) companies to …