{"id":197303,"date":"2008-02-14T17:53:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T22:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/02\/14\/economics-update-522\/"},"modified":"2008-02-14T17:53:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T22:53:00","slug":"economics-update-522","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/02\/14\/economics-update-522\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, we have <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/02\/14\/news\/economy\/bernanke_paulson\/index.htm?cnn=yes\">Bernanke and Paulson acknowledging that the economy is in trouble, but denying that there will be a recession in 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The thing is, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">we are already in a recession<\/span>.  Let&#8217;s seem consumer spending is flat, with a false increase being driven by increasing food and fuel prices, and the growth rate is less than the real inflation rate.<\/p>\n<p>In bond insurance, we have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marketwatch.com\/news\/story\/bond-insurers-have-days-re-capitalize\/story.aspx?guid=%7BF274E53A-6BA6-4B46-A87F-FDA51395AE5E%7D\">NY governor Elliot Spitzer saying that the Monolininers have 4-5 business days to recapitalize<\/a>, or they will lose their AAA ratings, and regulators will have to, &#8220;have to step in and separate bond insurers&#8217; municipal businesses from their more troubled structured finance units&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Bet that offer from Warren Buffet does not look so awful now.<\/p>\n<p>In mortgage loans, <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB120294935869166831.html?mod=googlenews_wsj\">banks are lobbying hard to put off their bad investment choices on the US tax payers<\/a>, which is not surprising, considering that house prices took their <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/02\/14\/real_estate\/home_prices_fall_for_year\/index.htm\">biggest quarterly drop ever<\/a>, a national median price drop of 5.8% in Q4 of 2007.<\/p>\n<p>Annually, that comes to about 23%\/year.<\/p>\n<p>The credit crisis is extending further, with <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/02\/14\/news\/economy\/auto_loans\/index.htm?postversion=2008021413\">delinqencies in assets backed by auto loans surging<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/02\/14\/news\/economy\/tradegap\/index.htm?postversion=2008021412\">Trade deficit fell in 2007<\/a>, for the first time since the 2001 recession.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, we have Bernanke and Paulson acknowledging that the economy is in trouble, but denying that there will be a recession in 2008. The thing is, we are already in a recession. Let&#8217;s seem consumer spending is flat, with a false increase being driven by increasing food and fuel prices, and the growth rate is &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1261,973,1004,1265],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bubble","category-economy","category-finance","category-housing-crash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197303"}],"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=197303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}