Economy

As part of our continuing series on “why things will proceed until the break,” we have this delightful article from the Washington Post, trumpeting the ‘findings’ of a study by a think tank representing the views of public employees that – surprise! – concluded that a “massive” hiring binge is required.

These days, it is nearly impossible to avoid the financial propaganda that is constantly spinning things to the positive.  One thing I never see mentioned is the fact that a lot of our “recovery” stands only to prove that people will take free money and spend it.

We have a rather expensive proof of the obvious in play here.

We’ve got $4,500 Cash For Clunkers vouchers, $8,000 tax credits for “first time” homebuyers, an additional $10,000 new home purchase kicker in CA, and more than a few additional quiet government subsidies.

There are a bevy of news articles beginning to appear, all centered on one of the central themes of the Crash Course – scarcity.

Below we see three examples. While there are more than a few who use the term “Malthusian” as though it were in irrefutable intellectual negation of an argument, more and more nation states and wealthy individuals are acting as if resource scarcity were a very real condition.

I truly believe that as net energy declines, the impact on resources, especially those requiring a lot of energy to extract and refine, will be multiplied.

I will be writing more on this at a later date. Here are the articles.

One of my favorite outfits is Sprott Asset Management, located in Toronto Canada, because their analyses tend to be quite data-rich and “reality-based” as well.

In this excellent, short-and-sweet report, the case is made that a 3.5% boost to GDP from government stimulus spending alone will hit in the third quarter of 2009.

This means that whatever reading is turned in, you should mentally subtract 3.5% from it, because “growth” resulting from government deficit spending is not real growth at all, it is merely consumption borrowed from the future.

These next two charts, showing that prime mortgages are now the key source of new foreclosures, are shockers. Taken together, they say that prime mortgages are just now beginning to act like subprime mortgages did back in 2007.

Note that prime fixed-rate mortgage foreclosures (red arrow) are now leading subprime adjustable-rate mortgages as the main source of new foreclosure activity.

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.