Frontier Outlook

Reports

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With the launch of Northwest Business Report, all new content will be posted on that website. I will continue to keep this site up as an archive of older articles. Northwest Business Report can be found at www.nwbusinessreport.com. Please update your bookmarks.

Northwest Business Report launched

I am pleased pleased to announce that Adrian Conley, Blake Bliven, Paul Goodhue, and myself have partnered to form Northwest Business Report. In time, this site will be merged with NWBR. Link below the fold.

Real estate trouble looming

This week’s housing reports were disappointing to say the least. Yale economist Robert Shiller, one of the most respected economists for research in the real estate market, put together some pretty disturbing data about the housing sector. The short story: we’ve got a lot more deflation to go in real estate.

Why we’re in trouble summed up in one picture

Financial blog Calculated Risk put a rather unnerving chart together from historical unemployment data. Check it out and see for yourself; image below the fold.

The best news from last week: Positive CPI

The big concern last week after the FOMC meeting was that the economy was in a liquidity trap and that deflation was a possibility. Fortunately, CPI was positive. This isn’t necessarily good news, but if the CPI numbers came out negative—things would have gotten ugly.

Commentary on the weak jobs report

Mohammed El-Arian of PIMCO wrote a guest post on the FT Alphaville blog on the jobs report. It’s worth reading, as a strong jobs report is what is going to be needed for markets to truly rally. His post blamed policy, although he was fairly vague as to what kinds of policies he would prefer. Link below the fold.

Very interesting interview on Afghanistan

Charlie Rose nails it again and has a must-watch interview with Max Boot and Julian Barnes on the Afghan war. Although not directly related to the markets, geopolitics and global affairs are important to study because of the far-reaching trends that they can create. Link below the fold.

A crisis wasted

Memo to Washington: slapping the title “financial reform” on a piece of legislation doesn’t actually mean that the bill is going to reform the system. This bill fixes some legitimate minor problems, changes some things that weren’t problems in the first place—and ultimately doesn’t address the root causes of the 2008 crisis. It’s a shame, since this was a rare opportunity to create real positive change in the financial system.