We’ve been hearing about impending chaos for more than a decade because the US is out-spending its growth rate. But markets continue to go up, houses go up, politicians get re-elected, and life is good (over the past 30 years). The end.
 
By that I mean the days of us not having to worry about living [...]

US house pricing stabilized after over 2 straight years of monthly decreases, and it took prices 32% lower than they were in 2006, plus near record low interest rates, plus a special tax break for first time home buyers, and moratorium on foreclosures. The real test of home price stabilization will be in December – [...]

First, as a continuation of the previous article, some of you may be wondering if a Spanish banking crisis may impact Brazil. The answer is probably not much. Despite the fact that some of the largest banks in Brazil are Spanish e.g., Santander, Brazil’s banks are run as independent entities from their parent companies in [...]

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the……….. Mount Fuji.  Didn’t see that coming did you? I have previously written about the state of the broad European economy and some of the countries therein. Specifically of interest are the PIGIS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Spain).  This note contains a brief update on Spain – and [...]

Expectations for Q2 2009 earnings plummeted steadily over the past year to a point where they were sufficiently low that they were fairly easily beat –albeit with large doses of government stimuli, gimmicks, accounting rule changes, and overt deception.  The same game is going to be played for Q3.
Their series of estimates tells us a [...]

Back when I was an engineering undergraduate student, one of my math professors used to distain statistics by saying that “in life there are lies, damn lies, and there are statistics”.  By this, he meant that you could mislead someone to reach an unsupportable conclusion via the clever use of statistics.
 
Case in point: a few [...]