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If This Is Recovery…
If This is Recovery, Where Are the Taxes?
Last Business Standing
Stimulus, What Stimulus?
The Reality of Unemployment
Let the Good Times Roll
The Quick Double-Dip Scenario
Phoenix, New York, and Thoughts on the Internet
No one goes into Wal-Mart and asks to pay extra sales tax. Thus sales taxes are reasonable barometers for retail sales. This week we look at how taxes are doing in a period of economic recovery. Then we turn our eyes to a very interesting (and sobering) analysis of possible future unemployment rates. This is an anecdote to the happy-face analysis of employment numbers you…
16Nov2009 | Thoughts From the Frontline | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Glide Path Option
The Present Contains All Possible Futures
The Ugly Unemployment Numbers
Argentinian Disease
The Austrian Solution
The Eastern European Solution
Japanese Disease
The Glide Path Option
Philadelphia, Orlando, and Phoenix
The present contains all possible futures. But not all futures are good ones. Some can be quite cruel. The one we actually get is dictated by the choices we make. For the last few months I have been addressing the choices in front of us, economically speaking. Today I am going to summarize them, and maybe we can look for some signposts that will tell us which path we’re headed down. For…
9Nov2009 | Thoughts From the Frontline | 0 comments | ContinuedCatching Argentinian Disease
Catching Argentinian Disease?
The Ascent of Money
The Independence of the Fed Threatened
A Few Quick Thoughts on the Dollar, GDP, and the Recession
Uruguay, Philadelphia, Orlando, and then…
I have been in South America this week, speaking nine times in five days, interspersed with lots of meetings. The conversation kept coming back to the prospects for the dollar, but I was just as interested in talking with money managers and business people who had experienced the hyperinflation of Argentina and Brazil. How could such a thing happen? As it turned out, I was reading a rather remarkable book that addressed…
2Nov2009 | Thoughts From the Frontline | 0 comments | ContinuedMuddle Through, R.I.P?
I first wrote about the Muddle Through Economy in 2002, and the term has more or less become a theme we have returned to from time to time. In 2007 I wrote that we would indeed get back to a Muddle Through Economy after the end of the coming recession. If you Google the term, at least for the first four pages more than half the references are to this e-letter. I get a lot of flak from both bulls and bears about being either too optimistic or too pessimistic. Being in the muddle through middle is comfortable to me.
Last…
19Oct2009 | Thoughts From the Frontline | 0 comments | ContinuedAnother Finger of Instability
"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none… The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear …" Friedrich Nietzsche
This weekend I turn 60 and have been a little more introspective than usual. I am often told that the letter I wrote well over three years ago on ubiquity and complexity theory and the future of the economy was the best…
7Oct2009 | Thoughts From the Frontline | 0 comments | Continued
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