Same Price . . . For Less?? At first glance, prices at the 2011 Minnesota state fair appear unchanged: the sign at the cheese curds stand says “Still $5!,” and tickets on the midway are the same as last year, 75¢ apiece. The catch? The cheese curds container got smaller (at least to my eye),...Read More
Going . . . Up The biggest price increase I’m aware of isn’t gas (up 40% in six months), groceries (up 20% in the same span), or health care (who knows??). It’s the price of online content (see, “Online Content: No More Free Ride(r)?”). So, effective March 30, David Rosenberg’s “Breakfast with Dave” will be...Read More
Divining Buyer Psychology What’s keeping Buyers from buying? I see three factors operating at the moment: One. Can’t qualify for a mortgage/bad credit. If you don’t have a job, or any money in the bank, you’re not going to get a loan. At least not one from a bank. Sadly, a couple years of grinding...Read More
Disconnecting the Heart Monitor In my post last week titled, “Approaching the Zero Bound,” I characterized the Fed’s plan to buy hundreds of billions ($600 billion, it turns out) in U.S. debt as a “hypodermic needle to the economy’s heart.” Actually, that analogy is not quite complete. The Fed’s money-injection plan, also known as quantitative...Read More
Grantham: ‘Almost Criminally Inept Fed’ The Federal Reserve’s asymmetric policy of stimulating stock moves by setting artificially low rates and then leaving the bull markets, when overstimulated, to bubble over, is dangerous. It is probably the most dangerous thing to inflict on a peace time economy with two possible exceptions — runaway inflation and a...Read More
“Hedonics,” Defined After almost 13 years, I finally popped for a new (home) office chair yesterday. The chair I retired — actually, handed down to son #2 — was an ergonomically correct, (then) state-of-the-art job purchased from a Relax the Back store in Manhattan for almost $800 in early 1998. Truth be told, it was...Read More
