Economics Update

Things have seemed pretty hectic today.

Normally I don't mention this, I think that it is just noise, but all three major stock indices are down 3%+, so while it's not yet raining Katz and Lehmans, it's pretty ugly.

Note that this is my economic update post, so I'm not going to claim that a certain VP pick's speech caused anything, and instead point at jobless claims spiking unexpectedly by 15,000, though truth be told, it should not cause that sort of reaction: the weekly data is simply too noisy for any rational investor to act upon the basis of those numbers.

But this isn't "rational investors" this be Wall Street, so it could have been the Lehman CEO's choice of shoes today.

The rest of the financial news is no where near as definitive, and even Federal Reserve officials are publicly disagreeing on whether the concern is recession or inflation.

Meanwhile, even though the Bank of England and the ECB kept rates steady, the cost of money in Europe went up, because the ECB has significantly tightened requirements to lend to banks.

In any case, the lack of rate hikes strengthened the dollar.

Mortgage rates are down this week, which would ordinarily be good news, but I think that "the markets" (and I) see this as a sign of a weakening economy, just as "the markets" (and I) see declining oil prices and declining gas prices as signs of a weakening economy.

Even so, the numbers for the service sector were good, so the blood on the street today is a bit odd.

Of course, it sucks to be a bank right now, with Community National Bank of Sarasota looking to be on the FDIC's Friday afternoon press releases, and Lehman floating the idea of creating a "bad bank" to shift bad assets to.

Someone needs to explain the concept to me, because it seems to suffer from the, "We've run out of gullible idiots," problem.

In any case, it appears that insurance giant AIG is considering something similar.

I'm not sure how piling crap in a separate pile really helps anything.