The Radford Free Press – Page 423 – All life is problem solving.

Economics / GDP, inventories, jobs, recovery, retail sales, unemployment /

Jobs and Sales: No Improvement?

January 14, 2010

Well we have two of our regular reports and neither is particularly encouraging. Sad to say, but we seem stuck in neutral at the moment. First: the weekly new claims for unemployment data was released this morning and tells us that claims rose 11,000 last week to 444,000. This is a small movement in the […]

Economics / bailouts, bank reform, bank regulation, banking, Bernanke, Fama, Keynes, Lucas, Mankiw, Minsky, Taylor Rule /

Was It Interest Rates?

January 13, 2010

One of the enduring myths about the banking implosion is that the real estates bubble was facilitated in part, or in main, by the incredibly lax monetary policy started by Alan Greenspan and then continued by Ben Bernanke. This story goes like this: interest rates were keep much too low for much too long during […]

Economics / Angelides, bailouts, banking, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Geithner, Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan Chase, Lloyd Blankfein /

The Crisis Commission: Day One

January 13, 2010

This is a week where news about the economy is scarce – the only notable data was the fact that the trade balance widened to $36.4 billion in November, which is both the worst since January last year and a fairly good sign that domestic activity is improving. So we learn nothing new even from […]