{"id":192608,"date":"2009-03-13T17:26:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T22:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/13\/economics-update-261\/"},"modified":"2009-03-13T17:26:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T22:26:00","slug":"economics-update-261","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/13\/economics-update-261\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it looks like bank failure Friday is going to be busy, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.caribbeanbusinesspr.com\/news03.php?nt_id=27640&amp;ct_id=1\">200 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) agents descending on <span>Puerto<\/span> Rico<\/a>, and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.calculatedriskblog.com\/2009\/03\/report-bankunited-halts-attempts-to.html\">report that <span>BankUnited<\/span> has halted attempts to raise capital<\/a>, which indicates a fair number of bank seizures, or at least <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">serious<\/span> investigations, and <span>BankUnited<\/span> is a fairly big bank.<\/p>\n<p>On the brighter side, we had the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601110&amp;sid=aQKaRDQmzuxI\">Consumer Sentiment Index rise in March<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, people are still buying very little, so international trade is falling, including the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/03\/13\/news\/economy\/trade_balance\/index.htm?postversion=2009031309\">US trade deficit<\/a>, which fell to a 6 year low.<\/p>\n<p>Part of this is that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/economics\/2009\/03\/12\/imf-trade-finance-costs-increasing-lending-standards-tighter\/\">banks are increasingly unwilling, or charging more, to issue letters of credit to shippers<\/a>, which makes shipping more difficult and expensive.<\/p>\n<p>This is being mirrored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=avH0BzYVvyes&amp;refer=home\">tepid response to the Federal Reserve\/Treasury program, the <span>TALF<\/span><\/a>, which has pushed back its start date because of the low number of interested parties.<\/p>\n<p>In energy, we have <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/03\/13\/markets\/oil\/\">oil falling on weak demand<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In currency, we have the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/03\/13\/markets\/dollar.reut\/index.htm\">dollar falling on the good consumer confidence numbers<\/a>, which slows the &#8220;flight to safety.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it looks like bank failure Friday is going to be busy, with 200 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) agents descending on Puerto Rico, and a report that BankUnited has halted attempts to raise capital, which indicates a fair number of bank seizures, or at least serious investigations, and BankUnited is a fairly big bank. &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,1004,1089,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-finance","category-recession","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192608"}],"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=192608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}