{"id":196395,"date":"2008-05-01T16:35:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T21:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/01\/economics-update-468\/"},"modified":"2008-05-01T16:35:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T21:35:00","slug":"economics-update-468","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/01\/economics-update-468\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First, <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/05\/01\/news\/economy\/initial_claims.ap\/index.htm\">initial unemployment insurance claims increase<\/a>, ba by 35K to 380K.  Note that this is an inherently noisy figure, but it&#8217;s been bad for over a month, which indicates a trend.<\/p>\n<p>Becasue of the Fed&#8217;s signals regarding future rate cuts, as na ga na do it, the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/05\/01\/markets\/oil_ap.ap\/index.htm?postversion=2008050115\">dollar has strengthened<\/a>, and oil has fallen a bit.<\/p>\n<p>That being said, the Euro zone appears to be <a href=\"http:\/\/iht.com\/articles\/2008\/05\/01\/europe\/01euro.php\">under increasing stress from the different economic trajectories of its members<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Citi appears to need more money, so it&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=aAfV7RVqGFA4&amp;refer=home\">raising it through a $4\u00bd billion stock offering<\/a>, further diluting its stock holders equity.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, it&#8217;s like a dog chasing its own tail&#8230;down the drain.<\/p>\n<p>We have a number out of San Diego, with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.signonsandiego.com\/uniontrib\/20080430\/news_1b30housing.html\">house prices off dropping 19.2% since February 2007<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This means that if someone bought a 30 year fixed mortgage, with 20% down, that they would be under water on the loan if closing and broker costs are included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First, initial unemployment insurance claims increase, ba by 35K to 380K. Note that this is an inherently noisy figure, but it&#8217;s been bad for over a month, which indicates a trend. Becasue of the Fed&#8217;s signals regarding future rate cuts, as na ga na do it, the dollar has strengthened, and oil has fallen a &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,975,1135,1004,1088],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-finance","category-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196395"}],"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=196395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}