70 Words

Going for Gold

02/07/2014

The Friday File: Since the first Winter Olympic games in 1924 through the Vancouver games of 2010, Norway, with a population of five million, has won more gold and total medals (303) than any other nation. The U.S. is second…

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Intergenerational Influence

02/06/2014

Based on a Norwegian study that controls for all socio-economic variables, when parents are awarded Disability Insurance, the likelihood that one of their adult children will receive DI rises by six percentage points over the next five years and by…

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Daunting Debt Destiny

02/05/2014

The CBO projects that the FY2014 budget deficit will be $514 billion, 3% of GDP, and will be just $478 billion or 2.6% of GDP in FY2015. The deficit then begins to rise as a percentage of GDP. A key…

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Going for Broke

02/04/2014

With $6.2 billion in gambling revenues, Las Vegas is the top casino market in the US, Atlantic City with $3.1 billion is second. Chicagoland is third at $2.2 billion, Detroit is fourth with $1.4 billion and Connecticut is number five…

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Yen Yearnings

02/03/2014

The US economy is 3.5 times bigger the than of Japan. Yet at current exchange rates, the Bank of Japan is injecting $53 billion/month into its banking system, equivalent to the Fed injecting $187 billion/month into ours rather than the…

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Touchdown Totals

01/31/2014

Touchdown Totals The NFL has revenues of $10 billion/year, more than any other sports league and its revenues are almost as big as the GDP of The Bahamas. Over the next decade, the NFL plans to increase its revenues to…

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Nattering Nabobs

01/30/2014

While naysayers dismissed today’s 3.2% Q4 annualized GDP growth number because 0.42% of it was from a rise in inventories, excluding them Q4 GDP was 2.8% while Q3 GDP was just 2.5%! Moreover, a drastic decline in federal government defense…

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Driving Behavior

01/29/2014

Six years after the start of the Great Recession, the total number of vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) is still 2.27% below the pre-recession high. Moreover, per capita VMTs are down a whopping 7.82% since peaking in June 2005. In the…

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Magic Money

01/28/2014

While the Fed balance sheet recently crossed $4 trillion, the amount that’s in Treasury securities is $2.23 trillion while the amount in mortgage backed securities is $1.53 trillion, for a total of $3.76 trillion, with the remaining $290 billion in…

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Fewer Fed Funds

01/27/2014

Despite the weak December jobs report, the Fed will announce later this week that it’s reducing its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage backed securities by another $10 billion to $65 billion/month, down from $75 billion/month in mid-December. Manufacturing continues…

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