Word: marchings
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...quarter ended March 31, retail sales of grand pianos were down 18.6%, according to the Music Trades magazine, and school-music product sales fell 6.5%. Nonstring instruments, from trombones and tubas to flutes and pianos, tend not to attract investment dollars because they diminish in value with wear and tear and age. Well-maintained string instruments are distinct - like wine - in that they appreciate with age as wood mellows and tonal qualities mature...
...hand with their not spending money on as many new things. In April, outstanding consumer credit - which includes credit cards, auto loans and tuition-financing but not mortgages - fell by $15.7 billion to $2.52 trillion, an annualized drop of 7.4% and the second largest dollar drop on record, after March's $16.6 billion decline. Numbers from April show that people are now saving 5.7% of their disposable income, the highest rate in 14 years. Second, people are shirking their obligations. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, one in eight U.S. mortgages is now in either delinquency or default. Banks...
...What will consumer spending look like? What will government deficits look like? What will my hair look like? But some of the most crucial unknowns have to do with corporate profits. Profits are, after all, what stock prices are supposed to be based on. Stocks have skyrocketed since early March, providing the earliest and strongest signal that the recession might ebb soon. One could even argue that rising stock prices brought optimism that has since begun to show up in real economic data, although if you think too hard about such feedback loops it will just make your head hurt...
Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the American journalists who were each handed 12 years in prison yesterday by a North Korean court for committing "hostile acts" by allegedly overstepping the border in March, have received a harsh sentence by Western standards of justice. The news is grim, to be sure. But former prisoners in Pyongyang's horrific penal system speculate that the pair may not have to endure the grimmest conditions, which very few have emerged to talk about...
...White House has already urged North Korea to release them "on humanitarian grounds." Sources knowledgeable about North Korean politics and prisons say Pyongyang will not allow the high-profile prisoners to starve to death, die of disease or endure torture. Small comfort. In any case, since their detention in March, the journalists have been visited by representatives of Sweden's embassy in Pyongyang, and over the weekend, some news outlets reported that former U.S. Vice President Gore may also be trying to go to North Korea on their behalf. How quickly those outside influences will make their way inside North...