Headlines versus Underlying Data
I sometimes think I live in a different planet than some people. My friend Cody, for instance, lives in a very different economic world...
The “greatest irony” is that he is called the Maestro
PIMCO’s Paul McCulley lays out a surprisingly stark bitchslapping smackdown on Easy Al Greenspan. First, he quotes the Maestro:...
Gold versus Stocks
The usually terrific Floyd Norris puts forth an interesting but somewhat flawed thesis in Friday’s NYT about Gold; it has some odd...
Inflation (ex-medical costs and insurance)
Barron’s Alan Abelson revisits an all too familiar subject: Inflation (ex-inflation) and fun with hedonics: "Of course, the...
Producer Prices Continue Ascent
Once again into the fray of inflation ex-inflation: Yesterday’s PPI data was not at all a net positive, despite the...
PPI data — Fun with Statistics?
Mike Panzner looks at the spread between the PPI and the nonsensical core rate: Over the past three decades, the spread between the...
Recapturing Lost Purchasing Power?
I don’t have an opinion (either way) on Greg Ip, the WSJ reporter who covers the Fed. But I have to call this sentence into...
Economists React to Fed
Yesterday, the the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee surprsied nobody with their 12th consecutive 1/4 point increase. The WSJ noted...
Parsing the FOMC Statement
ee Parsing the via the WSJ: "The Nov. 1 statement announced that the Fed was raising its key short-term interest rate by one-quarter...
Construction Costs Rising
We have had robust reflation/inflation ever since the Fed took rates down to half century lows, and then left them there for quite a...