New bankruptcies as consumer sentiment deteriorates.
Category Archives: financial markets
Distressing Table of the Day
Here’s the basis for the $945 billion estimate of losses to the financial sector. From the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report:
Recoupling, Monetary Policy Divergence, and the Dollar
At the risk of losing my audience by skipping over the the record housing price decline, and an outsized drop in the consumer confidence index, I’m going to focus on what seems like old news (but is being reflected in current news on the dollar), namely the OECD reduction in growth forecasts for the G-7 economies. The euro area economy is slated to do better than the US economy in 2008H1, but that’s not saying much.
Kicking the Can down the Road
More bad news
More confirmation that the slowdown in housing has spilled over to manufacturing.
Not a bailout
How shall we describe what happened this weekend with Bear Stearns? The first big casualty of the credit crisis, yes. Bailout, no.
President Bush Discusses Economy
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for coming by today to talk about the economic situation — we’ll be meeting later on this afternoon with the President’s Task Force on Financial Markets.
Asking too much of monetary policy
I remember a Federal Reserve economist once recounting a conversation with his young daughter, who asked him, “What do you do at work, Daddy?” He answered, “I help make important decisions.” “What kind of decisions, Daddy?” “Oh, things like how much money the government needs to print.”
Commodity prices and the Fed
If the Fed thinks that recent commodity price moves have nothing to do with their own actions, perhaps they should think again.
Tabulating the Credit Crunch’s Effects: One Educated Guess
In a recent paper, David Greenlaw, Jan Hatzius, Anil K Kashyap, Hyun Song Shin exposed us outsiders to the inside workings of those estimates we see of how the credit crunch affects output. The paper, entitled “Leveraged Losses: Lessons from the Mortgage Market Meltdown”, was widely covered ([1], [2], [3], Calculated Risk, Big Picture) but I still think that the conclusions, as well as the methodology, bear some repeating for emphasis. And in any case, it’s a long paper, and different people have focused on different aspects.