At the outset it must be said that, regardless of the day to day fluctuations of financial news, we are entering into unprecedented territory. What may be construed as long term planning may well be categorically different than medium term common sense.
The increases in the total federal debt outstanding are off of all known…

Over the past weeks we’ve been digging down into what might, or might not be the real story. Everybody seems to have an opinion or three, from world class money managers to yowling cretins, and none of them seem to fully add up. Whither the economy?
There is a bewildering array of evidence pointing…

The Dubai and Greek crises have forced investors to pay attention to something long ignored – rising sovereign risk. According to this week’s reports, Dubai is trying to settle debts for 60 cents on the dollar. Meanwhile, there has been no real progress in the unfolding Greek debt crisis.
Given the scale of fiscal deterioration…

We begin with the idea that this is a recovery, however an exceptionally heterogeneous recovery that may simultaneously surprise us by the strength of the positives (we think these may show up as earnings surprises in the manufacturing sector) and the depths of the negatives, by which we mean entire swaths of the American…

The recovery we are embarked on has a schizophrenic quality about it; it is typical and it is anything but typical, the diseased roots have been cleaned out and the diseased roots remain very much in place, central bankers have matters in hand and central bankers are clueless, economics offers sufficient explanations and economics…

The government’s plan to buy stolen data on Swiss bank accounts of alleged tax evaders generated a heated debate in Germany this week. A CD with some 1,500 names of German citizens with accounts at the bank (according to some reports HSBC’s private bank) was offered to the German authorities for the price of…

The GDP numbers that came out this week had a surreal feel to them. We earnestly tried to square the report with the monthly numbers we pick up off of the Fed’s database.  One supposes that this is the sensation a forensic accountant gets when his antennae are picking up incongruities, those little hints…

The past week had the unmistakable feeling of an inflection point. Such moments of transition are the coming into awareness of potential realities and possible futures that had been slowly percolating in the collective unconscious. Per Clausewitz, “ it is always out of a mere inkling and foreboding of the truth that a man…

Just when it seemed the small government ideal was dead and buried and Americans have fully embraced Euro-style socialism, Scott  Brown’s win of the Senate seat for Massachusetts has sparked a new hope.
The Republican’s victory has dealt a shocking blow to Obama on the first anniversary of his inauguration. It was the third defeat…

Here is a brief add on study to complement the cycle analysis we did in the last post, where we looked at the Chicago Fed National Activity Index. Today we take a look at the broad money supply in the US, known as M2.
For very suspicious reasons nobody has been willing to articulate, M3,…