{"id":189684,"date":"2010-02-23T21:16:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T02:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/23\/economics-update-85\/"},"modified":"2010-02-23T21:16:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T02:16:00","slug":"economics-update-85","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/02\/23\/economics-update-85\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The lede today is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/idUSTRE61M3OL20100223\">consumer confidence fell much more than expected<\/a>, down to 46.0, when the consensus forecast was 55.0, a 10 month low.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally, <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2010\/02\/23\/real_estate\/2009_Case-Shiller_report\/index.htm\">home prices fell in the 4<sup>th<\/sup> quarter<\/a>, though the housing optimists are noting that the year over year drop is &#8220;only&#8221; 2\u00bd%.<\/p>\n<p>When one considers the fact that the 4<sup>th<\/sup> quarter was juiced by tax credits, it&#8217;s worse than it looks.<\/p>\n<p>Japan, on the other hand, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601110&amp;sid=aAXru8HQldNA\">Japan\u2019s exports grew sharply in the 4<sup>th<\/sup> quarter<\/a>, with a 40.9% year over year, the biggest jump since 1980, largely on increases in exports to China.<\/p>\n<p>Still the dismal consumer confidence numbers put the market in a mind to doubt that there will soon be a robust recovery, which <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2010\/02\/23\/markets\/oil\/\">drove oil prices down<\/a>, and led to a flight to safety which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/ousivMolt\/idUSTRE5BF27F20100224\">pushed the Yen and the dollar up<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The lede today is that consumer confidence fell much more than expected, down to 46.0, when the consensus forecast was 55.0, a 10 month low. Additionally, home prices fell in the 4th quarter, though the housing optimists are noting that the year over year drop is &#8220;only&#8221; 2\u00bd%. When one considers the fact that the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1170,1080,973,1135,1188,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-currency","category-economy","category-energy","category-japan","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}