{"id":192711,"date":"2009-03-02T18:37:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T23:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/02\/economics-update-270\/"},"modified":"2009-03-02T18:37:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-02T23:37:00","slug":"economics-update-270","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/02\/economics-update-270\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know, I don’t normally do the stock market indices, but the Dow fell to below 7000 today<\/a>, and closed at 6,763.29, a 12 year low, and you can be sure that this spooks both the markets, and the regulators.<\/p>\n

More significant is the fact that personal savings in the US are way up<\/a>, and as the graph from Calculated Risk<\/a> shows.<\/p>\n

It’s been over a decade since personal savings were that high, and while generally this would be a good thing\u2122<\/sup>, right now the fact that people are deleveraging means that the economy is driven even further down.<\/p>\n

It makes sense personally, but in the aggregate, it makes things worse.<\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, even with the increase in savings, consumer spending rose in January by 0.6%<\/a>, which was unexpected, as did incomes, bu 0.4%, which was also a surprise.<\/p>\n

I think that it is a one month thing, though it might be the “Obama Effect,” making people more willing to spend now that a Bush and His Evil Minions\u2122<\/sup> are no longer running things, but in either case the effect is small, and unless we see increases for the next few months, things won’t<\/span> get better.<\/p>\n

We also saw the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index rise to 35.8 from 35.6<\/a>, beating expectations of a fall to 33.8, but note that this means merely that it’s contracting slightly less implosively than it would otherwise: any number below 50 is a contraction, and this makes 13 straight months of contraction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The full link to the ISM monthly report is here<\/a>, and it should be noted that their employment index is at all time (since 1947) low.<\/p>\n

In real estate, construction dropped to a 4\u00bd year low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the AIG bailout, and the concerns that it raises has driven oil down on concerns of more turmoil in the banking system<\/a>, and has driven the dollar up<\/a> in a flight to safety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I know, I don’t normally do the stock market indices, but the Dow fell to below 7000 today, and closed at 6,763.29, a 12 year low, and you can be sure that this spooks both the markets, and the regulators. More significant is the fact that personal savings in the US are way up, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,975,1135,1004,1221,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-finance","category-manufacturing","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192711"}],"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=192711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}