Category Archives: Uncategorized

TCW Group Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Gundlach said at a June 2007 Morningstar conference, “The subprime market is a total unmitigated disaster and it’s going to get worse. The delinquency rate is still climbing. At the same time, the ability of people to refinance is also going down. It’s just not a very attractive situation.” […]

It was always said that come what may, you can count on U.S. consumers. Not these days. For nearly 20 years, consumer spending has outpaced income growth in America. Credit everywhere they turned, the wealth effect of the dot com stock market, and then the ATM-like appeal of rising house prices was enough to make […]

From PIMCO Managing Director Bill Gross’s September Investment Outlook: It’s time to recognize that things have changed and that they will continue to change for the next — yes, the next 10 years and maybe even the next 20 years. We are heading into what we call the New Normal, which is a period of […]

Here’s Megan McArdle at The Atlantic responding to an interview up with Nick Gillespie of Reason on the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency: A consumer financial protection agency is not going to do much to help consumers. It is true that people don’t always understand all the terms in their credit card contracts or mortgages. […]

I wrote here a month ago that Japanese were wondering where talk of recovery was coming from. Japan had just reported its highest unemployment rate in six years at 5.4%, and its total number of jobless at 3.5 million. Credit Suisse Japan chief economist Hiromichi Shirakawa said, “Employment conditions are taking a turn for the […]