This post is a guest  contribution by Asha G. Bangalore * of The Northern Trust  Company

The main theme of the opinion piece by Representatives Hensarling and Ryan from Texas and Wisconsin, respectively, in today’s Wall Street Journal (Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan: Why No One Expects a Strong Recovery - WSJ.com) is poor economic policy choices of the current administration. To make their case they focus on the Reagan administration’s successful economic policies. The success/failure of economic policy choices can be measured by various metrics. It is well known that the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP during the Reagan years has been the largest in the entire post-war period ending 2008 (see chart 1). Therefore, from a fiscal perspective, the perceived success of economic policies of the 1981-1988 period is not a resounding success.

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Vladimir Putin has been ranked number 3 in the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world, President Medvedev comes in 43rd, after Deputy Prime Minister, siloviki chieftain and Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin at number 42. (See the editor's choice for Russia's top seven.) Forbes has got a special feature on the politician the Russian press apparently call 'the scariest person on earth'. There is little solid information about the man. Like many of Putin's cronies, Sechin is a St. Petersburg native. In the 1990s he worked in city government. Before that, it's widely believed he was a spy; Moscow sources confirm that he was a member of the GRU, the KGB's foreign-intelligence arm. ...

This post is a guest contribution by Asha Bangalore* of The Northern Trust Company.

The main aspect that stands out in the October 2009 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey is that lending conditions were less tight than survey results of July 2009 indicated and there was a substantial improvement from the October 2008 survey when credit markets had frozen. The net fraction of banks that reported tightening standards on commercial and industrial (C&I) loans for large firms dropped to 14% during October from 31.5% in July and was noticeably below the peak of 83.6% reported in January 2009 (see chart 1). A similar reduction in the number of banks reporting tightening lending standards was reported for C&I loans to small firms (see chart 1).

However, demand for C&I loans continued

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This post is a guest contribution by Asha Bangalore * of The Northern Trust Company.

The recession is behind us. Real gross domestic product of the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.5% in the third quarter after a 0.75 drop in the prior quarter. This is the first increase of real GDP after a string of four quarterly declines. Real GDP has declined in five out of the six quarters of the recession.

The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research will make the official announcement after it confirms the turning point based on revisions of economic data. This recession is the longest on record in the post-war period and the deepest also. Real GDP has declined 3.8% from the peak in the second quarter

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People have been scratching their heads wondering why the price of oil has held up relatively well this year in the face of a global slowdown and decreased energy demand in the United States.

Fundamentalists will point to continued strong demand for oil from emerging markets like China and decreasing oil output from non-OPEC producing nations such as Russia and Mexico. But then we have the conspiracy theorists who say the only reason that oil prices are so high is due solely to huge quantities of oil being held offshore in tankers by those greedy oil companies in order to boost their profits.

First of all, why would anyone want to store oil in tankers and not sell it? After all, it costs money to charter those oil supertankers. Storing oil in tankers does make sense if the price difference between crude oil sold for immediate delivery and the price on oil

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eDoorways Corp. today announced the release of its “Benefits to Small Businesses” video vignette. This video introducing eDoorways’ platform, educating its target audience on the functionality and uses of its doorways, as well as communicates the company’s progress to shareholders.

Gary Kimmons, Chairman & CEO of the eDoorways Corporation explains, “The objective of eDoorways is to allow the small businesses that may have limited resources to make the best use of those resources so that they can compete with the big guys.”

eDoorways believes that a majority of the approximate 15,500 small businesses operating in Austin would make prime eDoorways business customers. With more than 200 businesses currently signed up since the company launched its first phase of the “SOLVE” doorway, eDoorways is quickly moving into the remaining phases.

“The process of forming the SOLVE focus groups is kicking off this week with a

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This post is a guest contribution by Paul Kasriel* of The Northern Trust Company.

There is a growing concern about an inflationary threat in the U.S. economy given the enormous monetary accommodation the Fed has put in place. As expected, there are differing opinions about this issue. First, the unemployment rate in September was reported as 9.8%; the all inclusive unemployment rate is 17% (see chart 1).

Wages are unlikely to be the cause for a large increase in inflation in the near term because widely used measures of wages pressures are trending down (see chart 2), given the lack of demand in the labor market. By the way, the Federal Reserve tracks these variables to form its assessment of inflation.

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This post is a guest contribution by Asha Bangalore* of The Northern Trust Company.

The tone of the policy statement and details are largely close to expectations. The federal funds rate was left unchanged at 0%-0.25%. The statement reiterates Chairman Bernanke’s opinion that an economic recovery is underway, representing a significant departure from the August policy statement which noted that “economic activity is leveling out.” The outlook for inflation remains favorable in the Fed’s opinion due to “substantial slack” in the economy. In addition, the stability of longer-term inflation expectations was cited to rule out the case of an inflationary threat.

The last paragraph of the Fed policy statement is devoted to the outlook of monetary policy. The Fed left the stance unchanged to read as follows: “The Committee will maintain the target range for

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The number of traders betting that oil prices will drop outnumbers the number of traders who believe they will rise by the largest margin ever. Some analysts believe prices will fall significantly lower in the near future – at least into the low $60 a barrel range – after soaring to $75 a barrel in August.

Supply has outrun demand this year as a global recovery has yet to accelerate. Yet, oil prices more than doubled from February to August and are up about 50% from where they started the year.

Now, many traders are positioning themselves to profit from a pullback. The gap between prices of options betting on a decline in prices and those that would profit as a result of a rise in oil has widened to a record 10 percentage points, according to five years of data compiled by Banc of America Securities-Merrill Lynch.

Put options, which give traders

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This post is a guest contribution by Asha Bangalore* of The Northern Trust Company.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the arbiter of business cycles, officially announced the trough of March 1991 on December 22, 1992 and the trough of November 2001 on July 17, 2003. Based on this history, there is a lapse of roughly 20 months before the Business Cycle Dating Committee has announced the date of a business cycle trough. Real gross domestic product had risen in the second quarter of 1991 (see chart 1) and the fourth quarter of 2001 (see chart 2) and stayed positive until the next recession.

Real gross domestic product is projected to show an increase in the third quarter of 2009. Real gross domestic product is a quarterly estimate.

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