Evidence is mounting that U.S. home prices are finally hitting bottom, and now comes the best news yet: Fannie Mae says that for the first time since 2008, it won’t need money from the Treasury Department to balance its books. Fannie Mae, the biggest backer of U.S. home loans, used to brag that it would be safe from even a severe downturn in the housing market. That turned out to be tragically incorrect. It has drawn $117 billion in aid since being seized by federal regulators in 2008. Fannie’s announcement today is good news on two counts: It means taxpayers won’t have to shell out any money to support Fannie (at least related to the first quarter—it may need support in the future). More important, ... Continue reading →
If you spun a globe and stopped your finger 12 times on 12 random countries, they just might make more sense for a monetary union than the euro zone. That's the conclusion from this awesomely clever chart showing the difficulty, and maybe impossibility, of the euro experiment (click to expand). Here is what this chart shows. Compared across more than 100 factors measured by the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, from corruption to deficits, JP Morgan analyst Michael Cembalest calculates that the major countries on the euro are more different from each other than basically every random grab bag of nations there is, including: the make-believe reconstituted Ottoman Empire; all the English speaking Eastern and Southern African countries; and all countries on Earth at ... Continue reading →
Surprise: Deeper recessions are not followed by faster recoveries. @BW @DeanBaker13 Continue reading →
Surprise: Deeper recessions are not followed by faster recoveries. @BW @DeanBaker13 Continue reading →
Disappointing, but not shocking. The government’s report Friday that the economy created fewer jobs than expected in April—115,000—showed an unwelcome deceleration of America’s job-creating machine. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had a median forecast of 160,000 jobs created. In the big picture, though, the nearly 3-year-old expansion is proceeding at the same pace as the previous two. Slow recovery, in other words, is the New Normal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent in April from 8.2 percent in March. But that wasn’t great news, because it reflected a decline in the share of the population in the labor force, to the lowest level since December 1981. When people drop out of the labor force they aren’t counted ... Continue reading →
This jobs recovery is weak, all right, but right in line with the past two recoveries. Continue reading →
