{"id":192563,"date":"2009-03-19T17:28:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-19T22:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/19\/economics-update-257\/"},"modified":"2009-03-19T17:28:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-19T22:28:00","slug":"economics-update-257","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/19\/economics-update-257\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday is new jobless day, and the numbers suck with new claims falling to a still very high 646,000 and continuing claims hitting a new record of 5.47 million<\/a>, which is a new record….Again.<\/p>\n

This implies that people are still unable to find jobs, but, for a while, at least<\/span>, employers have run out of people to lay off….Delightful.<\/p>\n

We also had the Leading Economic Indicators falling<\/a>, though not as badly as the consensus prediction, and the Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook Survey for March remained awful<\/a>, from -41.3 in February to -35.0 this month, so we are still seeing a contraction.<\/p>\n

In the auto industry, the bailout has been extended to parts suppliers<\/a>, to the tune of %5 billion.<\/p>\n

In real estate, it looks like Moody’s might cut the ratings on some $241 billion of debt for jumbo mortgages<\/a>, which means that it must suck to live in a high cost real estate area right now.<\/p>\n

In the world of the here and now, Moody\u2019s did<\/span> downgrade insurance company Prudential<\/a>, and I’m wondering how long before the rest of the insurance industry looks like AIG.<\/p>\n

In any case, it appears that the Fed’s decision to start quantitative easing (printing money) is having an effect, with the cost of borrowing falling<\/a>, with 30-year fixed mortgages falling to 4.98%<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Fed has also driven the US dollar lower<\/a>, with the dollar hitting $1.36:\u20ac1.00 for the first time since January.<\/p>\n

We are also hearing rumors that Citi is considering a reverse stock split<\/a>, my guess is that this is how they want to address the worry that they might become a penny stock.<\/p>\n

In energy, oil broke $50\/bbl<\/a> for the first time this year, on the falling dollar and reports that OPEC members are more-or-less keeping to their quotas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday is new jobless day, and the numbers suck with new claims falling to a still very high 646,000 and continuing claims hitting a new record of 5.47 million, which is a new record….Again. This implies that people are still unable to find jobs, but, for a while, at least, employers have run out of …<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-auto-industry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-finance","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192563"}],"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=192563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}