{"id":193244,"date":"2009-01-06T18:22:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T23:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/06\/economics-update-309\/"},"modified":"2009-01-06T18:22:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-06T23:22:00","slug":"economics-update-309","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/01\/06\/economics-update-309\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, real estate sucks, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realtor.org\/press_room\/news_releases\/2009\/01\/economic_slump_weakens_phs\">pending home sales falling by 4%<\/a> (BTW, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/\/id\/28517399\">Manhattan apartment prices fell 4% too<\/a>, so ain&#8217;t <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">nothing<\/span> going up.)<\/p>\n<p>Manufacturing data is out too, and it&#8217;s grim, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=asv7dBL9meiw&amp;refer=home\">factory orders falling twice what was forecast<\/a> in November, and <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/01\/06\/news\/companies\/toyota_plants\/index.htm\">Toyota deciding to idle its plants for 11 days over February and March<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The last time Toyota did this was in the early 1990s recession, and they did it for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">one<\/span> day.<\/p>\n<p>Services did better than expected, with the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/01\/06\/news\/economy\/ISM_services\/index.htm\">Institute for Supply Management&#8217;s (ISM) non-manufacturing index rising<\/a>.  The prediction was that it would fall from 37.3 to 37 in November, but it rose to 40.6.<\/p>\n<p>Better than expected, but any number below 50 still counts as contraction.<\/p>\n<p>A bit of up news is that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.calculatedriskblog.com\/2009\/01\/credit-crisis-indicators-improvement.html\">Calculated Risk&#8217;s Credit Crisis Indicators are showing improvement<\/a> today.<\/p>\n<p>But with all this going on it is no surprise that <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/01\/05\/news\/economy\/bankruptcy_2008\/index.htm\">consumer bankruptcies rose by nearly a third in 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The problem with the 2005 act was that people don&#8217;t declare bankruptcy on a whim, they declare bankruptcy when they fall of the tight rope that is middle class existence in the United States, and there is no safety net to catch them.<\/p>\n<p>In currency, the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2009\/01\/06\/markets\/dollar\/index.htm\">dollar rose against the Euro<\/a>, largely on the expectations of further rate cuts by the ECB.<\/p>\n<p>In energy, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/\/id\/28511256\">oil finished the day down<\/a>, but it spent part of the day above $50\/bbl for the first time in about a month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, real estate sucks, with pending home sales falling by 4% (BTW, Manhattan apartment prices fell 4% too, so ain&#8217;t nothing going up.) Manufacturing data is out too, and it&#8217;s grim, with factory orders falling twice what was forecast in November, and Toyota deciding to idle its plants for 11 days over February and March. &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,1135,1004,1088,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-energy","category-finance","category-real-estate","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193244"}],"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=193244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}