{"id":191909,"date":"2009-06-08T17:18:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T22:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/06\/08\/economics-update-204\/"},"modified":"2009-06-08T17:18:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T22:18:00","slug":"economics-update-204","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/06\/08\/economics-update-204\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think that the lede for today is the fact that two of the most prominent indicators of consumer distress, consumer credit card delinquency<\/a> and consumer bankruptcy filings<\/a> are up 11% and 37% year over year respectively.<\/p>\n

These “green shoots” are all about the bankers, not about the real economy, or real people.<\/p>\n

What’s more, indicators of the economy that are independent of investment banking, things like, the American Trucking Association Tonnage Index<\/a> and the AAR’s reports on rail volume (same link), continue their downward trend.<\/p>\n

The so-called “green shoots” are things like the Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index<\/a>, which improved for the first time in 16 months:<\/p>\n

The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)\u2122 saw a small uptick in May. The index now stands at 89.9, increasing 0.2 percent from the revised April figure of 89.7, and down 20 percent from a year ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, a 1 months uptick of less than 0.3% is a promising sign (100=1996), even though it’s still down 29% year over year, and 1996 was a great year only by the standards of the Bush economy.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in international finance, downgraded the Celtic Kitten, Ireland from AA+ to AA<\/a>, because Ireland, the Baltics, and much of the rest of the new EU members have experienced growth driven more by speculative flows rather than real economic development.<\/p>\n

In energy, retail gasoline was up again this week<\/a>, that’s about 27% in the past month and a half, to $2.613\/gal, though oil was down slightly<\/a>, largely on a stronger dollar<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think that the lede for today is the fact that two of the most prominent indicators of consumer distress, consumer credit card delinquency and consumer bankruptcy filings are up 11% and 37% year over year respectively. These “green shoots” are all about the bankers, not about the real economy, or real people. What’s more, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,975,1135,1004,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-finance","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191909"}],"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=191909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}