Update 349 — Today’s Leveraged Loan Market: Animal Spirits or 2020 Recessionary Canary? The leveraged loan market may not sound like a factor in the 2020 elections, but 18 months before the 2008 election, leverage was already off the dial, Wall Street was booming, and no one predicted the economic or electoral consequences. Odds that …
Update 344 — Will You be Able to Retire?Boomer vs. Millennial Takes on Senior Security The average age of baby boomers is 65 today. 10,000 boomers retire every day and thousands more reach the antediluvian retirement age of 65. Those who haven’t retired are generally unprepared for it financially. Among millennials and younger Americans, the …
Update 340: Middle Class Cash & Credit CrunchCase Studies, Problems and Policy Solutions The long-awaited, much discussed, often feared inversion of the yield curve — where long-term yields fall below short-term ones — occurred at about 1 pm ET this afternoon. As we have discussed, this is a widely recognized harbinger of recession, news that …
Update 339 • In Memoriam • Prof. Alan Krueger Labor Economist Applied Actual Facts to Policy Princeton Professor of Political Economy Alan Krueger passed away this weekend at the age of 58, leaving behind a breadth of work and critical thinking that challenged mainstream economic discipline and gave rise to a new form of applied …
Update 337 — Federal Paid Leave Policy: Unreformed Since America was Great Again The last major federal legislation on family and medical leave — the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) — was in 1993 under President Bill Clinton. A big step forward for families and workers, FMLA nevertheless excludes from coverage over 40 percent …
Update 330 — House Fin. Services Drilldown: Subcommittee Chairs, Members, Agendas Chairwoman Maxine Waters and the House leadership have announced assignments for House Financial Services Subcommittee seats in the 116th Congress. No less than a dozen freshmen, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Katie Porter of California, have landed spots on prominent subcommittees, such as …
Update 326 — Household Debt Through the Roofas Students, Homeowners, Consumers ReleverageThe growing national appetite for debt is not limited to the federal government or to corporate America, as covered in the previous Update. Households, too, have rediscovered the virtues of debt and they are turning increasingly to nonbank sources of financing. Are we turning …
Update 325 — Economic Groundhog DayNo Shadows; Corporate Debt Clouding Horizon The American debt binge is not limited to the national debt. As we will show below and in the next update, private debt has scaled up in recent years just as precipitously, to mix monetary metaphors. We start today with a look at …
Update 324: Our Systemically Riskiest Markets… Beyond a Shadow of a Notional Doubt The long weekend ahead —or the furlough as the case may be — affords the opportunity to look at the little-understood but vast shadow banking system. Many firms involved in the 2008 financial crisis continue to operate in a relative regulatory void, …
Update 322 — Bear or Bull: What’s the Beef? What Market Volatility Means for Real Economy Markets are notoriously difficult to read, let alone predict. And market performance correlates to growth and other macroeconomic factors in an opaque way. But the increasingly erratic capital markets are arresting attention and arousing concerns. Which of these real …
Bear or Bull Market: What’s the Beef? (January 11) Read More »
