Market Overview

We identify six key issues facing investors: US Economy Brinkmanship in Athens Cyclical Recovery in Europe BOJ Policy Response RBA Meeting Oil Prices US EconomyThe March jobs data was a...

What we measure matters. As Dirk Philipsen writes in his forthcoming The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press), “Choices about...

Paul Krugman points out an interesting Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) discussion in which James Pethokoukis, a very good conservative economist, explains why many conservatives didn’t support Ben Bernanke...

Early this week two posts hit my inbox within hours of each other - and I was thinking that the authors of these posts could not be living in the same world. One, (Professor Paul Krugman), was...

'The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations... they think ahead and create their mental picture, and the go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in...

That stats just keep getting stranger and, if you’re a policymaker or an investor, scarier. According to a (now widely publicized) McKinsey & Co study, instead of deleveraging after the...

I had an interesting conversation this week with a trader about the merits of taking entry signals on an intra-day basis compared to an end of day basis when trading breakouts. Below I will try and...

-- VIX challenged its weekly Intermediate-term resistance at 16.45 before closing beneath its mid-cycle support at 14.32. VIX remains on a buy signal. SPX closed above Intermediate-term support. SPX...

The Trade Weighted US Dollar Index has been growing since Q4 2011. Its growth increasing over the last nine months. The annual rise in CPI is below 2%, and the US economy remains relatively weak. The...

A reliable source for recession forecasting is the unemployment rate, which can provide signals for the beginnings and ends of recessions. The unemployment rate model (article link), updated with the...

Initial ReactionFor a huge change we see the existing pattern of a strong establishment survey but a poor household survey has been replaced by weakness all around. Last month I stated: "The household...

Greece to Make April 9 IMF Repayment April 9th was one of the critical dates by which Greece was said to be out of cash. By now most expect these kinds of deadlines to come and go in belief the...

Summary: The March employment report is important, confirming the slowing of the US economy. This post skips our usual numbers blizzard, focusing instead on the vital numbers, and debunking both the...

The world rally resumed despite a holiday-shortened week for six of the eight indexes on my world watch list (only the Nikkei and Shanghai indexes were open on Friday). The big winner for the week was...