Archive for August 27th, 2009

Luxury Homebuilder Toll Brothers Shows Some Surprising Strength

One of the most common bits of conventional wisdom surrounding the housing crisis has been that the upper end of the market was just beginning to tank and would suffer for some time. The logic behind the argument is that with the destruction of equity that’s occurred there is and would continue to be a […]

Fed President Lacker Suggest It May Be Time To Back Off On QE

This is interesting. Richmond Fed President, Jeffrey Lacker, is out today with comments suggesting it might be time for the Fed to start pulling back a bit. From Reuters: The U.S. economy appears to have stabilized and may not need all the stimulus the central bank had planned to offer, Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President […]

Weekly Unemployment Claims

It bores me as much to write about this as it probably does you to read about it but the numbers are important and as good a coincident indicator as you can get with respect to the economy. Initial claims for unemployment came in at 570,000 which represents a decrease of 10,000 from the prior […]

Furloughs Forever

As if all the prognostications about a jobless recovery and permanently higher structural unemployment weren’t enough, along comes an observer who suggests that some of the nasty workplace innovations that came from this recession are here to stay. Writing in BusinessWeek Chris Farrell to suggest that furloughs, pay cuts and other “innovative” corporate solutions are […]