{"id":193066,"date":"2009-01-22T18:43:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T23:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/22\/economics-update-297\/"},"modified":"2009-01-22T18:43:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T23:43:00","slug":"economics-update-297","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/22\/economics-update-297\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

The weekly new claims for unemployment jumped last week<\/a> by 62,000 last week, to 589,000, the highest level since 1982, and more than predictions.<\/p>\n

The 4 week average was flat, and continuing claims were worse than predictions too, at 4.607 million.<\/p>\n

If that weren’t enough housing starts fell by 15.5% to 550,000<\/a>, which, according to Calculated Risk<\/a>,is, “by far the lowest level since the Census Bureau began tracking housing starts in 1959<\/span>.”<\/p>\n

Mortgage applications fell by 9.8% last week<\/a>, because interest rates bumped by 0.37%, and most of the action right now is ReFi.<\/p>\n

Over in Asia, the Bank of Japan is buying corporate bonds<\/a>, because the credits markets have frozen there, and China’s economic growth fell to a 7 year low<\/a> for the 4th quarter.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, it looks like the humongous loss phenomenon is moving from the banking giants to the regional banks<\/a>, which may have a larger effect on business output, since they do a lot less of the high finance and a lot more lending to mom and pop businesses.<\/p>\n

In commodities, steel production fell 1.2% in 2008<\/a>, the first annual drop in a decade, while oil was up a few pennies<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

In currencies the dollar was down vs. the Euro and Yen<\/a>, but up against the Pound…but then again, everything<\/span> is up against the pound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The weekly new claims for unemployment jumped last week by 62,000 last week, to 589,000, the highest level since 1982, and more than predictions. The 4 week average was flat, and continuing claims were worse than predictions too, at 4.607 million. If that weren’t enough housing starts fell by 15.5% to 550,000, which, according to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1170,1080,973,975,1004,1188,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-finance","category-japan","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193066"}],"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=193066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}