Business

In mid-January, just as the market was crashing due to among other things concerns that the economy was prolapsing, we had a brief exchange with the Atlanta Fed asking them why they waited until the after the close of trading to report that its Q1 GDP estimate had crashed to the lowest yet, at 0.6% (incidentally almost exactly what the final Q1 GDP print was), a number that is traditionally revealed at or before noon. The Fed's answer: "Apologies for the late-day data release. Nothing more nefarious than technical difficulties, which we believe have been resolved."

Via GEFIRA,

The Bank of Japan’s unexpected rate cuts to negative are a desperate attempt to help out the FED and to support the dollar at the expense of the aging Japanese population.

The negative market reaction to the FED’s rate hike of December shows that investors do not believe an economic recovery in the US is underway. Two reasons make central banks start to raise interest rates.

The US military faces five “big challenges,” Ash Carter told the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday.

Those challenges are: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS.

So essentially, the exact same “challenges” Washington has been trotting out for years to justify hundreds upon hundreds of billions in defense spending, only with one CIA pet project gone horribly awry added to the list.

Submitted by Tony Sagami via MauldinEconomics.com,

“At current spot rates, we would expect a significant impact to revenue and profit again in 2016.”—Martin Schroeter, CFO of IBM

We’re in the middle of earnings season, and one of the themes I am hearing over and over from American companies is how the strong dollar is killing their profits.

In the leadup to the financial crisis, lenders did some pretty silly things.

The securitization bonanza and the attendant proliferation of the “originate to sell” model drove lenders to adopt increasingly lax underwriting standards.

Put simply, the pool of creditworthy borrowers is by definition finite. That’s a problem because the securitization machine needs feeding. So what do you do if you’re a lender? Why, you expand the pool of eligible borrowers by making it easier to get a loan.