Econ70
The Friday File: Due to costly raw materials and slow growth, a wave of consolidation is pouring over the beer industry. The 4 biggest breweries; Anheuser-Busch-InBev, SABMiller, Heinekin and Carlsberg all foreign (the biggest US owned brewery is Sam Adams),…
The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is losing relevance. Outstanding LIBOR borrowings have fallen 63% in the past 3 years and it has failed to capture turmoil in the banking sector due to the Euro crisis. Why? Central banks around…
Euro leaders continue to deny the debt crisis they face. Rather than boosting the size of the Euro Stability Fund, which would give investors in Italian and Spanish bonds confidence, they ban short selling for a few weeks, get the…
The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index fell to 54.9 (the lowest level since the recession of ‘81)! This reading is, I think, a result of the corrosive debt ceiling debate; not due to chronic problems like high unemployment and…
Chinese exchange rate and monetary policy is little more than a huge a transfer of income from poor households to wealthy corporations. An undervalued Yuan makes imports expensive but helps exporters. Similarly, very low interest rates on savings accounts and…
The Friday File: Designers of fancy clothes believe their clothes lend an air of status and prestige to the wearer. And they do! Research shows that it is not the design itself that counts but the label! Why? Same reason…
Declaring the Yen’s rise to be a threat to the economy the Bank of Japan massively intervened in the foreign exchange market to drive down its value. The Swiss did the same thing and now so are the Turks! I…
9 of the 12 members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions over the decade, have been announced; it looks bad. Because there are 6 Ds and 6 Rs, 1 member…
Mexico is now the #1 supplier of methaphetamines in the US. Two reasons: a crackdown on marijuana eradication in Mexico has pushed producers there into synthetic drugs like meth which can be made more discreetly, can be produced in just…
The July jobs report showed 117K new jobs, but the report also showed no rise in temporary help, no jump in hours worked, no bump in overtime. And, annualized wage growth of 2.8% in July was less that the 3.4%…