Housing Starts Surge, Jobless Claims Plunge
Wow. A couple of economic reports just hit the ball out of the park … kind of. The Commerce Department reported that housing starts jumped...
Author : Iacono Research Blog
However This Debt Crisis Ends Up, It Will Be Good For Gold
I don’t know if anyone else is calling the debate over the U.S. debt that is now heating up in Washington a crisis, but, based...
Falling Energy Costs Keep Consumer Prices Flat
The Labor Department reported that consumer prices were flat in December following a decline of 0.3...ent in November and, for all of 2012, the government’s...
Germans to Repatriate Much of their Gold
Obviously, today’s news about the German government making plans to bring home a good portion of their gold reserves in the years ahead is pretty...
A Couple More Data Points Related to the Debt Ceiling
Brett Arends reminds us in this report at Marketwatch that, contrary to what President Obama noted in a press conference yesterday, we are kind of...
December Retail Sales Were Surprisingly Good
The Commerce Department reported(.pdf) that retail sales in the U.S. far exceeded analysts estimates for just a modest gain, jumping 0.5 percent in December following...
Part of the Answer is Hubris
There is, of course, substantial economic literature on financial fragility … that seeks to explain credit bubbles in behavioural terms – exploring how, for example,...
A Succinct Summary of the Nation’s Debt Problem
After the trillion dollar coin idea was mercifully euthanized over the weekend (a development that will hopefully lead to...ewer musings like The Quadrillion Dollar Thought...
Student Loans Accounted for 87 Percent of the Overall Increase in Outstanding Consumer Credit Last Year
More evidence that the appetite for credit in the U.S. is changing in new and very disturbing ways comes in the realization that student loan...
A Novel Idea: Confirm the Borrower’s Ability to Repay
The new mortgage rules coming out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are pretty amusing for anyone who was early in calling the housing bubble...