Word: economisters
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Back in September, V.V. Chari, an economist at the University of Minnesota and an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, got a call from a Congressman. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were arguing that they needed $700 billion to save the nation's financial system, and the Congressman wanted to know what to make of it all. Chari said he didn't know - he hadn't looked at the data. Policymakers kept talking about how banks weren't lending to businesses or to individuals or even to each other, so Chari pulled numbers...
Bernstein: Our U.S. economist, Dave Rosenberg, is not the most bullish economist you'll meet - he's still thinking the GDP's going to continue to decelerate pretty much through 2009 followed, maybe, by slightly better growth in 2010. When the recovery does come it will be somewhat anemic relative to past recoveries. So, he's still looking for what people call a saucer-shaped recovery as opposed to the V-shaped recovery that a lot of people like to talk about...
...prices began to fall in late summer, after gas topped $4 a gallon, and the drumbeat of bad economic news has sent them ever lower. "Prices got to an insane level," Texas economist M. Ray Perryman says, "but they are equally insane now." With the price of a barrel of oil hovering in the $45 range and natural gas cut in half from a high of $14 per thousand cubic feet, the domestic energy sector is now at a critical "tipping point," Perryman says. If prices dip lower, he adds, the pace of the slowdown will quicken as domestic...
...avoid losses, Japanese banks kept pumping fresh funds into debt-ridden, unprofitable firms to keep them afloat. These companies came to be known as zombie firms - they appeared to be living but were actually dead, too burdened by debt to do much more than live off further handouts. One economist called Japan a "loser's paradise." The classic zombie was retail chain Daiei, which limped along for years, crushed by debt and multibillion-dollar losses, as banks kept bailing out the firm. Daiei, with nearly 100,000 employees at the time, was considered by politicians too big to fail...
Satoru Ogasawara, economist for Credit Suisse in Tokyo who covers foreign exchange, expects the yen to advance to 85 to the dollar within three months and to 83 over the next year. Intervention, he says, will come at the 85-level, but even then it is difficult to predict what will happen. "What we're seeing is the unwinding of the yen carry trade," says JPMorgan Chase's Sasaki, referring to the practice of buying low-interest yen and investing it in high-yield currencies. "It's a very strong and powerful movement and it's difficult to stop...