re: kathleen hayes;
you know, this is getting harder and harder for me to laugh at and soooo typical of an ecoNOmist. have you ever noticed how excited she gets when she has a list of numbers to spout off (unemployment, investor sentiment, GDP, etc)?
someone on this thread said the only thing an economist is good for is telling what happened after its already happened (and usually they still get it wrong). -ng-
<<. Weekly chain store sales have bounced around of late, and were down 0.3 percent in the July 13 week. But the week before they rose 0.7 percent(well, duh) and on a year-over-year basis they were still up 3.5 percent (WoW!!) in the July 13 week. The trend since the September 11 attacks has been higher.
(uh maria, i mean kathleen, maybe that amazing 3.5% increase is from people who used to be able to shop at Macys and Bloombergs, or did you even bother to check into the numbers of the higher end retailers??)
<<The word on auto sales for the first ten days of July is that they may have picked up nicely as zero percent financing got people back in the showrooms. (Well sure kathleen, what the hell is so encouraging about going to a car dealer and driving out with a new car with no money down It's true that the stock market's scariest declines occurred after that, but it's not like investors haven't been dealing with the actual and psychological impact of stock market losses for awhile. So the fact that it looks like they are still buying cars is interesting. (uh, kathleen, it seems to me they're almost borrowing the cars, ever bother to notice all the SUV's in the used car lots?)>>
<<In fact, if the jobless claims decline holds and they don't start moving higher, economists say we have seen the peak for this business cycle at 6 percent. In past recessions, unemployment moved much higher than that. Plus, if 6 percent of the labor force is unemployed, that means 94 percent is still working -- and bringing home paychecks. maria, oops, sorry again, kathleen, that 94% that's still working, ever stop to think what kind of pay cut they had to take to remain EMPLOYED. oh, i guess your precious numbers don't take that into account, do they? maybe mopping floors at mcdonalds might be the reason for that increase in retail store sales (like the dollar store).
<<Then there's low mortgage rates, and rising home prices. Higher home prices make homeowners wealthier (uh, sweetie, take some advice from an old building contractor. that homeowner is NOT wealthier until they sell that house, walk out of the closing and cash that check), and, according to Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (boy you just lost all creditability right there), that helps blunt the pain of shrinking stock portfolios. Low mortgage rates help make homes affordable even when prices are rising. And the low rates are also fueling a mini-refinancing boom, which puts money into consumers' pockets.>>
sorry for the rant. |
