Business

Chipotle has had enough of being an e-coli associated Mexican food company: according to Bloomberg, the fast food (and at least in recent months, just as fast food-poisoning company) may be getting into the burger business.

The company filed a trademark application this month for “Better Burger,” according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. Chipotle, which has already invested in two smaller chains, is considering opening another restaurant concept focused on hamburgers, according to Chris Arnold, a spokesman for the Denver-based company.

Submitted by Colin Chilcoat via OilPrice.com,

The United States and Canada work well together. The countries share the world’s largest and most comprehensive trade relationship, exchanging more than $2 billion per day in goods and services; the U.S. is Canada’s largest foreign investor and Canada is the third-largest foreign investor in the U.S. The partnership clearly isn’t broken, but it may need some mending as bilateral and international gas trade stands to complicate matters in short order.

While the Fed has long been focusing on the revenue part of the household income statement (which unfortunately has not been rising nearly fast enough to stimulate benign inflation in the form of nominal wages rising at the Fed's preferred clip of 3.5% or higher), one largely ignored aspect of said balance sheet has been the expense side: after all, for any money to be left over and saved, expenses have to surpass income.

Following two disappointing auctions earlier this week when first the 2Y and then the 5Y auctions either demonstrated a substantial drop off in bid-side interest or priced wildly through the when issued, we said to await today's 7Y auction for the true picture of demand for primary paper, as the first auction took place when Europe was out for Easter vacation, and the second one took place just as Yellen speaking at the Economic Club yesterday.

There has been an odd shift when it comes to US sentiment toward home ownership: while in the past, the higher home prices rose the greater the demand was for housing (leading ultimately to the housing debt bubble of 2006), this time around we are getting increasingly more frequent indications of just the opposite.

Some have started to notice: as we noted one week ago, in its traditionally cheerful assessment of the US housing market, the NAR's Larry Yun snuck in an unexpected warning: