{"id":192036,"date":"2009-05-20T17:21:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-20T22:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/05\/20\/economics-update-217\/"},"modified":"2009-05-20T17:21:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-20T22:21:00","slug":"economics-update-217","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/05\/20\/economics-update-217\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, let’s lead with a rather unique bit of news, the volume of the derivatives market fell for the first time ever in the last 6 months of 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The outstanding contracts fell by 15% to $592 trillion<\/span> dollars (!!), or about forty times the GDP of the United States<\/span>, and 110% of the entire planet<\/span>.<\/p>\n

My guess is that people suddenly realized that they had absolutely no idea at all<\/span> what the hell they were holding, and started to unwind, because they did not know who they could trust.<\/p>\n

It’s the sort of story I like, so I put it first even though by all rights the fact that Japan’s GDP fell at a 15.2% annualized rate in the first quarter of this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That’s Eastern Europe imploding numbers.<\/p>\n

Export driven economies like Japan’s are going to take a hit, which is why
Moody\u2019s is warning on possible downgrades of Asian banks<\/a>, specifically those in Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.<\/p>\n

Still we have a couple of glimmers on real estate, with the Architecture Billings Index holding steady in April<\/a>, indicating that there future building is at least taking a pause downward, and mortgage applications rose in response to low interest rates<\/a>, though much of that is refi activity.<\/p>\n

Of course, the commercial real estate market market is still heading down sharply, which is why the Federal Reserve has expanded the TALF to include commercial mortgage backed securities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ending with oil and the US dollar, oil finished above $60 for the first time since November<\/a>, $62.04\/bbl, and the dollar hit a 5-month low<\/a> on more optimism about the world economy.<\/p>\n

I don’t get that last bit. All I see is a dead cat bounce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, let’s lead with a rather unique bit of news, the volume of the derivatives market fell for the first time ever in the last 6 months of 2008. The outstanding contracts fell by 15% to $592 trillion dollars (!!), or about forty times the GDP of the United States, and 110% of the entire …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,1135,1004,1088,1089,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-energy","category-finance","category-real-estate","category-recession","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192036"}],"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=192036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}