Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Starbucks to Close 600 U.S. Stores
July 2nd, 2008Via: AP: For a decade it appeared there was no such thing as too many Starbucks for U.S. coffee drinkers, whose willingness to buy its $4 lattes and dark drip brews rationalized a second green-and-white mermaid awning just down the street — and sometimes even a third. But in a sign that those days are […]
Vacant Homes Spread Blight in Suburb and City Alike
July 2nd, 2008Via: Christian Science Monitor: In Mesa, Ariz., officials are trying to decide what to do about boarded-up McMansions that become party pads, trashed in raucous “raves” where invitations come by text message. In Atlanta, thieving from abandoned properties is so bad that police caught one man building a new house entirely of pilfered materials from […]
Thieves Stealing Manhole Covers
July 1st, 2008Via: USA Today: Cities and counties are battling manhole-cover thefts, a crime spree that police tie to the weak economy. Hundreds of 200-pound covers have disappeared in three months in California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Georgia as scrap metal prices pop up. “It’s a sign of the times,” says Sgt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee […]
Factories Hit Worldwide as Commodity Prices Soar
July 1st, 2008Via: Reuters / Guardian: Soaring commodity costs are denting manufacturing activity in Asia and Europe and the outlook looks bleak as new orders drop off in the face of rising prices, surveys showed on Tuesday. Manufacturing activity in the euro zone contracted in June for the first time in three years while business confidence in […]
Grave Robbing
June 30th, 2008Via: St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Grave robbing has become an above-ground affair. Gone are the days when enterprising thieves would dig up an old grave and pillage for gold teeth and rings. Today, it’s mostly the bronze markers and flower vases that draw their attention. Rising scrap metal prices, coupled with the lagging economy, have triggered […]
UK: Mortgage Approvals at Lowest Level Since Records Began
June 30th, 2008Via: Guardian: The number of mortgages approved for house purchases dropped sharply in May to its lowest level since records began in 1993, figures showed today. The Bank of England said 42,000 mortgages were approved for purchases during the month, down from 58,000 in April and 63,000 in March. This is the thirteenth month running […]
The Legal Trump Card: Make Them Produce the Note
June 30th, 2008The firm externalized the financial risks of being in this business by selling all of the paper they generated into the secondary mortgage market at the end of every month. This is an institutional marketplace that trades in commoditized mortgages, “debt paper.” In other words, at the end of each month, the firm had none […]
IMF to Conduct “X-Ray of the Entire U.S. Financial System”
June 30th, 2008What becomes of the IMF if this audit is actually carried out? The U.S. has the largest quota of SDRs and largest percentage of votes in the IMF. The whole system would be shown to be the farce that we already know it to be if the most powerful member (and one of the founding […]
Gold: Technical Analysis
June 29th, 2008WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument. The weekly interval gold chart is looking interesting. The stochastic has been extreme oversold and hasn’t uncoiled yet. The big picture uptrend is still intact. So, with that stochastic still quite compressed (it’s no longer extreme), there’s a good chance that […]
U.S. Dollar Index: Technical Analysis
June 29th, 2008WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument. The U.S. Dollar Index has been meandering higher, but Friday’s close represented a break down and out of the recent, uptrending channel. Well, it depends on how you draw the channel. It might still be in a longer term channel, but […]
