{"id":196236,"date":"2008-05-14T16:42:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T21:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/14\/economics-update-459\/"},"modified":"2008-05-14T16:42:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T21:42:00","slug":"economics-update-459","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/14\/economics-update-459\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The CPI rose less than expected 0.2%, though there was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2008\/05\/14\/inflation-eases-despite-h_n_101656.html\">a huge delta in food<\/a>, about 0.9%, 2.5% and 11% annually rates.<\/p>\n<p>Look at my earlier posts on this issue, and you&#8217;ll see that the real inflation is far closer to 11% than it is 2.5%.<\/p>\n<p>This has, for reasons unclear to me, <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/05\/14\/markets\/euro_dollar.ap\/index.htm\">led to the UD dollar strengthening in overseas markets<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Year over year <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/business\/2008\/may\/14\/subprimecrisis.useconomy\">foreclosures in the US are up 65%<\/a>, and between the banks discounting these properties, and the builders discounting new homes, we have a way to go to bottom.<\/p>\n<p>In investing, the dispute between Clear Channel, which had a deal to sell itself to a private equity firm, and the banks, who were trying to get out because they had no expectation of being able to resell the debt, <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/05\/14\/news\/companies\/clear_channel_settlement.ap\/index.htm\">has been settled<\/a>.  The buyout is now at 36$\/share, as opposed to the earlier $39.20\/share, so both sides took a haircut to get the deal done.<\/p>\n<p>Still this indicates that the credit markets are still frozen.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, we are back to the monoliner insurers. with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=az2uYHRScTSM\">MBIA and Ambac&#8217;s losses making the ratings agencies nevous<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If the ratings process was an honest one, they would have lost their AAA status over 6 months ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The CPI rose less than expected 0.2%, though there was a huge delta in food, about 0.9%, 2.5% and 11% annually rates. Look at my earlier posts on this issue, and you&#8217;ll see that the real inflation is far closer to 11% than it is 2.5%. This has, for reasons unclear to me, led to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,1004,1200,1045,1088],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-finance","category-inflation","category-insurance","category-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196236"}],"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=196236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}