{"id":192421,"date":"2009-04-02T17:22:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T22:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/02\/economics-update-247\/"},"modified":"2009-04-02T17:22:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-02T22:22:00","slug":"economics-update-247","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/02\/economics-update-247\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have the weekly unemployment claims report<\/a>, and it is not pretty, with 669,000 new claims, an increase of 12,000, the 4 week moving average was up 6,500 to 656,750, and the continuing claims hit 5,728,000, up 161,000.<\/p>\n

Note that the initial claims number constitutes a 26\u00bd year high<\/a>, and continuing claims are at the 9th all time record level in 9 weeks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the credit news is not good, with Calculated Risk’s Credit Crisis Indicators<\/a> somewhat improved, though still at pretty awful levels, but Moody’s downgraded $1.76 trillion in corporate debt<\/a> in the first quarter of 2009, and both credit card charge-offs<\/a> and home equity loan delinquencies<\/a> have climbed to record levels.<\/p>\n

In real estate commercial real estate defaults hit a new record<\/a>, and the formerly unassailable real estate of Manhattan is sales volume falling 48%<\/a>, though house prices rose in the UK for the first time since 2007<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Additionally, the Feds efforts to lower mortgage rates appear to be working, with the 30 year fixed mortgage rate hitting a new low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, auto industry analysts are doing handsprings over the March auto sales figures<\/a>, because annualized sales figures rose to 9.86 million up from February’s rate of 9.12 million, though dealer incentives also rose 5%.<\/p>\n

Your call as to whether an 8% increase of awful, the normal annual sales runs at about 16 million, is something to crow about.<\/p>\n

In either case, other manufacturing had an uptick, with Chinese manufacturing increasing for the first time in 4 months<\/a>, and US factory orders rising for the first time in 7 months<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Yurp, the European Central Bank cut its rates by only 25 basis points<\/a> (\u00bc%), less than expected, and as a result the Euro strengthened vs the US dollar<\/a>, though the ECB President has said that more rates might be forthcoming<\/a><\/p>\n

In energy, the rising stock market (Dow above 8k for the first time in about 7 weeks) has driven oil higher<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have the weekly unemployment claims report, and it is not pretty, with 669,000 new claims, an increase of 12,000, the 4 week moving average was up 6,500 to 656,750, and the continuing claims hit 5,728,000, up 161,000. Note that the initial claims number constitutes a 26\u00bd year high, and continuing claims are at the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1108,1080,973,975,1004,1088,1089,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-auto-industry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-finance","category-real-estate","category-recession","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192421"}],"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=192421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}