{"id":193527,"date":"2008-12-09T21:52:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T02:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/09\/economics-update-327\/"},"modified":"2008-12-09T21:52:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T02:52:00","slug":"economics-update-327","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/09\/economics-update-327\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

We already knew that Japan was in a recession, but the updated data is worse than the initial data<\/a>. The preliminary number was 0.1%, the prediction was 0.2%, and it came in at 0.5%.<\/p>\n

Barry Ritholtz notes that the 4 Week T-Bill was paying 0%<\/a>, down from 0.4%, and notes that the only reason to do this is if you expect that the next 4 week T-Bill will have a negative interest rate, i.e. that you pay the government money for the honor of lending them your money.<\/p>\n

Turns out that he was a a little bit premature, because the 3 month T-Bills actually traded at negative interest rates<\/a>, “If you invested $1 million in three-month bills at today\u2019s negative discount rate of 0.01 percent, for a price of 100.002556, at maturity you would receive the par value for a loss of $25.56.”<\/p>\n

If you want to feel concerned note that this is the Lowest Rate Since 1929<\/a>…1929….That year sounds familiar.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the Bank of Canada cut its key rate by 75 basis points to a 50-year low<\/a>, because they are in recession too.<\/p>\n

In real estate, the Pending Home Sales index fell<\/a>, though not by much, and listing prices for homes have continued to fall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Calculated Risk has a summary of the commercial real estate market<\/a>, and it ain’t pretty.<\/p>\n

In energy, oil is down a bit<\/a>, likely spooked by the complications on a bailout deal.<\/p>\n

The dollar was mixed today<\/a>, up a bit vs the Pound and Euro, and down a bit vs. the Yen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We already knew that Japan was in a recession, but the updated data is worse than the initial data. The preliminary number was 0.1%, the prediction was 0.2%, and it came in at 0.5%. Barry Ritholtz notes that the 4 Week T-Bill was paying 0%, down from 0.4%, and notes that the only reason to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1113,973,1004,1188,1088,1089,1164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada","category-economy","category-finance","category-japan","category-real-estate","category-recession","category-teotwawki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193527"}],"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=193527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}