With still 4 days before Christmas, the Nat’l Retail Federation did not let the weekend snow storms from altering their opinion that holiday sales will decline 1% y/o/y. Discounting that may have ended over the weekend will just get extended to bring back the weekend hibernating customers. While Greek bonds [...]
The following comes form a major US trading desk
Yesterday
From support to resistance…to support…to resistance… Yesterday was notable more for gold’s decline than anything else, really. The precious metal was crushed, spot prices falling below $1100 per ounce briefly after opening at $1138, and the gold mining stocks really [...]
This Elizabeth Wurtzel piece has been gnawing at me all day:
The class of associates that just joined Cravath was asked to defer their arrival for a year in exchange for a sweet deal: They would receive $80,000 to not work, plus they would get benefits and student-loan payments. This [...]
Click on graph for larger image in new window.
With the US$ counter trend (I emphasize counter trend as secular decline will continue again at some point) rally apparently underway, which I believe began on Nov 17th when Bernanke uttered the word ‘dollar’ in terms of its impact on commodity prices and thus inflation, here is a very unscientific [...]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has just released a report showing that carbon dioxide emissions from light trucks, cars, and SUVs have fallen dramatically since 1975 even as the proportion of SUVs and trucks sold has increased to nearly half of all sales. Grams of carbon per mile have [...]
From the New York Times:
The decline of the American dollar has led to a trade imbalance north of the border, on the rinks of the National Hockey League.
Over the past two decades, the Canadian teams in the N.H.L. were considered poor cousins of their colleagues in the United [...]
NBER paper by Bound, Lovenheim, and Turner (2009).
Partly as a consequence of the substantial increase in the college wage premium since 1980, a much higher fraction of high school graduates enter college today than they did a quarter century ago. However, the rise in the fraction of high school graduates attending college [...]
In a bit of a surprise turn, unemployment dipped slightly in November. Numbers released this morning show that unemployment fell from 10.2% to 10%, with workers cutting just 11,000 jobs last month. Some had expected as many as 130,000 jobs to be lost, which was roughly the average lost [...]
The Nov Payrolls fell only 11k, much better than expectations of a fall of 125k and the prior two months were revised up by 159k. The household survey rose by 227k after a decline of 589k in Oct and combined with a drop in the labor force sent the unemployment [...]
True socialists don’t support reactionary conservatives like Clive Hamilton:
it’s a sign of the decline of Left politics that a reactionary, pro-censorship sexual moraliser who hates the idea of working people enjoying a higher material standard of living could ever be considered left-wing…
It’s time that left-wingers stood up [...]
Reuters:
Jobs Loss at 169,000 in Nov., Worse Than Expected: ADP: U.S. private employers shed fewer jobs in November from October, marking the eighth straight monthly decline in private-sector job losses, a report Wednesday showed. Private companies shed 169,000 jobs last month, fewer than the 195,000 jobs lost in [...]
