America's Economic Future – A Discussion By Ted Kavadas
Over the last few months a notable divergence has occurred between the U.S. and Chinese stock markets. Two charts illustrate this divergence. The first shows the S&P500 vs. the Shanghai Composite on a daily basis: chart courtesy of StockCharts.com The second chart shows a chart of FXI, the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index. This chart …
The Wall Street Journal has recently had two more articles concerning alleged Ponzi schemes. The first is titled “Our Ponzi Nation: Florida Entrepreneur Hit With Charges.” The second is titled “Alleged Ponzi In Colorado Has Shades of Madoff Affair.” Also, there was an interesting story from April 17 titled “Report Says SEC Missed Many Shots …
Here are various indicators that are supposed to predict and/or depict economic activity. These indicators have been discussed in previous blog posts: The April Chicago Fed National Activity Index (pdf) (last updated 4/29/10) The Consumer Metrics Institute’s Contraction Watch: The USA TODAY/IHS Global Insight Economic Outlook Index: an excerpt dated 4/29/10: “The April update of …
Here are four charts reflecting confidence from the SentimenTrader.com site. They provide a longer-term historical timeframe, which I have found to be rare. Here are the charts. Each is plotted vs. the S&P500: Conference Board Consumer Confidence, last updated 4/27/10: University of Michigan Consumer Confidence, last updated 4/16/10: ABC News Consumer Comfort Index, last updated …
On April 23, chartoftheday.com had an interesting chart, shown below, that compares the median home price vs. the price of Gold: Traditionally, houses have been viewed as “hard assets.” However, as one can see above, their recent (from a long-term historical perspective) price pattern seems more geared to that of a “paper asset” – i.e. …
As an extension of the last post concerning bubbles, here are two of Alan Greenspan’s past comments that I find particularly relevant given our current environment: This is from a September 26, 2005 speech he gave in which he speaks about how negative “shocks” may impact the economy. I find this quote interesting as it …
On April 8 I commented upon William C. Dudley’s “Asset Bubbles” speech. In that speech, he refers to Frederic Mishkin’s speech of May 15, 2008. It should also be noted that Mishkin offered similar thoughts in a Financial Times op-ed of November 9, 2009. There is much I can comment about in each of Mishkin’s …
Pricing is a very complex discipline even during periods of economic growth and stability. With the onset of increased economic uncertainty and volatility over the last few years, pricing’s complexity has significantly grown. Of course, it is impossible to characterize all firms as having the same pricing issues, as each industry and firm has a …
One of the key questions with regard to economic activity is the extent to which it is being driven by inventory replacement. As seen in the CalculatedRisk blog of March 12, “the contribution to GDP in Q4 from ‘Change in private inventories’ was 3.88 of the 5.9 percent annualized increase in GDP.” Here are …
As an additional note to the last post, on April 12 the CalculatedRisk blog had an interesting post titled “Recession Measures.” In it, he discussed key measures that the NBER uses to determine recoveries. In the post he shows four charts, constructed in a “percent of peak” fashion. Here are the two that I find …