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...data keep reinforcing the story that the U.S. economy has turned a corner and should be out of recession sooner rather than later. The latest strong signal came on Friday, when the Labor Department's May employment report showed a dramatic slowing in job losses, to 345,000, down from 504,000 in April and a peak of 741,000 in January. That many jobs lost in a month is still horrible, but the big change from the previous month and the fact that forecasters expected far worse are both indications that the economic tide has probably turned...
...there are tides, and there are currents. I keep thinking of something I heard Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of bond-investing giant Pimco, say at a conference in April: "We are so focused on whether recovery will be at the end of this year or the beginning of the next that we lose sight of the more important question. It's not whether the recession will be over; it's, What does the new normal look like?" (Watch TIME's video of Peter Schiff trash-talking the markets...
...case, the future path of corporate profits should eventually determine whether the stock market will keep rising, whether companies will start hiring again, whether this recovery will feel like much of a recovery or not. And while Wall Street's analysts are all making (for the most part increasingly optimistic) estimates of what those profits will be, they really have no idea. That's because the mostly rising corporate profits of the past 35 years have been in large part the product of a long, long rise in indebtedness, especially consumer indebtedness...
...That rise in indebtedness is now giving way to what looks to be a long slide. At least, it had better be; if consumers start piling on debt again, we'll just have another, bigger credit crisis in a few years. But if they keep increasing their savings rate and reducing their debt loads, that's bad news for corporate profits, not just bank profits. Anybody who makes things that in recent years were bought on credit, from houses to washing machines to cars, is likely to be affected. So are stock prices. "Higher borrowing produces both higher profits...
Certainly, the subjects' increasing familiarity with the test may have helped account for the improvement; this is just what happens in the real world, after all, when students take the SAT multiple times in an attempt to boost their scores. But in the real world, the test doesn't keep getting longer; here it did - and yet the scores marched higher all the same. What the researchers believe explains the improvement is fatigue - or more precisely, what the fatigue represents. A feeling of exhaustion is often a stand-in for anxiety. Most students - particularly comparatively high achievers who have already...