Public Archives

The number of articles out there in the mainstream press that are designed to create the impression that all is well practically constitute a deluge at this point.

One thing I like to do, especially when an article comes out in a reputable paper like the NYT, is to check their facts to see if they square up with the tenor and tone of their “it’s safe to get back in the pool” articles.

Here’s a perfectly fine example from today:

One of the key questions is, “Can the Fed ever unwind all of the positions it has taken on from failed banks and Wall Street firms?”

This is an important question, because if the answer is “No, at least not precisely when they wish to do it,” then it raises the risk that all that hot money will prove immune to efforts to recall it and it will whiz around creating all sorts of monetary trouble.

Now that the Fed has declared that the recession has ended and green shoots are everywhere, the next obvious part of this journey will have to be the unwinding of the massive amounts of stimulus and thin-air money that has been injected into the system.

Certainly after watching the risk-money out-chasing junker stocks well up off their lows, we can surmise that the speculative animal juices are flowing again and that the Fed might want to consider taking away the punchbowl.

Instead, today the Fed bought another $18.8 billion net ($32.4 billion gross) in agency mortgage-backed securities, which represents the exchange of thin-air money for GSE MBS paper.

Since it’s such big news, I will report on the latest unemployment report by the BLS, but I dislike spending too much time on it because I consider it one of the weaker or murkier sources of data, at least on a monthly basis.

Often it conflicts heavily with other private or more reliable sources of data, which have been collectively telling a grimmer story than today’s headline news release of an additional loss of 217,000 jobs for August 2009.

Regardless, here’s the news, with my analysis:

In this post, I respond to the recent flurry of activity in print and in blogs about the dollar, US indebtedness, and the risks associated with both.

I was not a good father today.

Instead, I engaged in laboriously hand-entering data to satisfy a question that has been bothering me for a while.

The issue that was worrying at me was the apparent discrepancy I’d mentally noted between the happy-happy increase in existing home sales, as reported by the NAR last week, and what I remembered from the MBS mortgage application releases.

But who could be sure?

Perceptions can be tricked and need to be tested and subjected to fact-based inquiry.

This blog post is the most recent Martenson Report, which I am now making available for wider distribution.  I believe this needs to be read and understood by as many people as possible. 

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Executive Summary

Initial jobless claims rose last week, a bit higher than expected, but that’s not what was featured at the top of the article below.

Instead, the claim was made that because the number of people on the unemployment rolls dropped, that this was a signal that the labor market may be stabilizing. 

This is an inappropriate and misleading claim to make.

The release of the July unemployment report was filled with a wide array of distortions and inexplicable results (especially from the Birth-Death model), which have undoubtedly resulted in a better-than-warranted reported gain. In this post we’ll explore these oddities in some detail.

The news: