2008 was a practice run, or a warning shot across the bow, compared to what is coming over the next few years. 2008 did not demonstrate what a liquidity crunch really means, but this time we are going to find out. As with many aspects of financial crisis, Greece is the canary in the coalmine, demonstrating what happens when liquidity disappears and it ceases to be possible to connect buyers and sellers or producers and consumers. As we have said
Read More...These are numbers six and seven in a series of articles documenting the principles and practice of eco-thrifty renovation written by Estwing of the ETR Blog for the Wanganui Chronicle. Retrospective #6: Window Battens You will recall from last week that I am a big fan of Neil Diamond and of pelmets. Unfortunately, Neil canceled his Wellington show last year. L Also unfortunate is that installing pelmets is probably not an option for most renters. (More on that in a
Read More...Carl Mydans Boys playing May 1936 "Decatur Homesteads, Indiana" A month and a half ago, I posed the following question in Spain, Land of Magical Financial Realism: These days when I read about Spain I'm wondering more and more how and why it is that the country has any access at all left to international finance markets. The essence of the article was that Spanish banks were/are buying Spanish sovereign bonds with money (well, money…) borrowed from the ECB, while
Read More...Dorothea Lange Route 99 February 1939 "On U.S. 99 near Brawley, Imperial County, California. Homeless mother and youngest child of seven walking the highway from Phoenix, Arizona, where they picked cotton. Bound for San Diego, where the father hopes to get on relief 'because he once lived there.'" As everything connected to Europe seemed to fall apart even before US jobs numbers were announced, and we could say I told you so a thousand times when it comes to debt
Read More...So the May NFP report was released today, and it was nothing short of horrendous for the U.S. economy. On expectations of 150,000 jobs created, the actual figure came in at 69,000 AFTER factoring in an addition of 204,000 jobs through the spurious Birth/Death Adjustment, and the unemployment rate rose slightly from 8.1% to 8.2%. What’s interesting here is not the fact that the U.S. jobs market is deteriorating and threatening to consume the U.S. economic “recovery” that never was
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