Analytically, there are three components to an interest rate. The first is the risk that the money will not be paid back. This is a very big factor when dealing with corporate bonds, especially junk bonds. For the U.S. government's obligations, as the owner of a nice shiny printing press that can always be turned on to pay back any obligation denominated in dollars, that part is assumed to be zero. The second part is expected inflation. After all, if you decide that you want to consume something later, rather than today, and thus decide to save and invest your money, you want to be sure the dollar you put away today buys at least as much in, say, ten years that it does today. If you expect that it will buy less bread, gasoline and clothing in ten years, then you would demand a higher interest rate ...

The Federal Reserve decided to keep the Federal Funds rate unchanged at the meeting it concluded today, as expected. Below is the current Fed Statement along with the one from their September meeting in paragraph-by-paragraph format, with my translation and commentary interspersed. As the graph below shows, the market is expecting the Fed to remain on hold, with Fed Funds between 0 and 25 basis points for an extended period. The graph shows the expected outcomes for the January meeting (before today’s announcement) from the Cleveland Fed. The market set the odds of anything other than standing pat at either today’s meeting or the December meeting effectively at zero. Reading off the chart, it looks like about a 95% probability of no action in January as well. I doubt we will see the Fed raise rates before the third quarter of 2010. The Fed is ...

Helped by the "first-time home buyer" tax credit and other forms of government assistance, home prices -- as measured by the Case Schiller Composite 20 index -- rose for the third straight month, up 0.97%, but still down 11.36% on a year-over-year basis, and off 29.89% from its May 2006 peak (note below when I reference peak levels they are from May 2006, not from the individual city peaks, which might have been a few months before or after the national peak). Since home prices do exhibit a fair amount of seasonality, I am working with the seasonally adjusted numbers. Most of the press has a habit of tracking the unadjusted numbers, which I feel is a mistake. So realize that the numbers presented here might be different from what you read in the newspaper tomorrow. A total of 16 of the 20 cities registered price increases, ...

The Consumer Price Index, or CPI rose 0.2% in September, down from a 0.4% increase in August and down 1.3% from a year ago. If food and energy prices are stripped out to get to core inflation, prices also rose 0.2%, up from 0.1% in August. Core inflation is up 1.5% from a year ago. On a year-over-year basis, those numbers are likely to flip in the coming months. Food prices actually declined slightly for the month, with a 0.1% decline in September reversing a 0.1% increase in August, and unchanged from a year ago. In particular, the price for food at home fell 0.3% in September after being unchanged in August. On a year-over-year basis, prices at the grocery stores are down 2.5%. This is not good news for firms like Kroger's (KR) and Supervalu (SVU). It is energy that is the big difference between ...

For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL – October 8, 2009 – Zacks Equity Research highlights Guess? (GES) as the Bull of the Day and Washington Federal (WFSL) the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on J.P. Morgan (JPM), Citigroup (C) and Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST).

Full analysis of all these stocks is available at http://at.zacks.com/?id=2676

Here is a synopsis of all five stocks:

Bull of the Day:

Guess? (GES) reported better-than-expected results for the first half of 2010, thanks to strong North American sales, operating cost controls and smart inventory management. In addition, the company's strong cost-control efforts helped it maintain a lower operating cost structure, which in turn helped it navigate through the difficult economic conditions.

Management also issued optimistic guidance for the third quarter, although it declined to provide guidance for fiscal year 2010. For

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The table below from the Federal Reserve of Atlanta is interesting. It looks at all the recessions since 1970, and how long it took for unemployment to peak after the recession technically ended, and how much longer after that that the Fed actually started to tighten up. The short 1980 recession, which was really the first part of a double-dip recession, is excluded. Note that unemployment always peaks after the recession is over. However, in earlier recessions the time lag between the end of the recession and the peak of unemployment was brief. This sort of holds for the 1970 recession as well, since there was a double peak in unemployment (6.1%) in both December of 1970 and in August of 1971. If the first peak were used, the time from the end of the recession to the unemployment peak would have been just one month, and to ...

The Federal Reserve decided to keep the Fed Funds rate at its historically low level, and noted that growth was starting to pick up and there was very little threat of near-term inflation. The current statement and the one from the previous meeting (8/12) are presented below, along with my analysis of the statements and the differences between them. "Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in August suggests that economic activity has picked up following its severe downturn. Conditions in financial markets have improved further, and activity in the housing sector has increased. Household spending seems to be stabilizing, but remains constrained by ongoing job losses, sluggish income growth, lower housing wealth and tight credit. Businesses are still cutting back on fixed investment and staffing, though at a slower pace; they continue to make progress in bringing inventory stocks into better alignment with sales....

Tomorrow afternoon all eyes will be on the Federal Reserve, which is currently holding one of its every-six-weeks get togethers. I and probably the rest of the world expect no change in the Fed Funds rate. It is currently near zero, so there is no room for further cuts, and it is extremely premature for them to raise rates again. The real interest will be in deciphering the policy statement. I would expect a more upbeat tone about the pace of economic growth and continued confidence that they have inflation under control. There is about a mile of economic slack in the system, and while there are some indications that it is starting to be reeled in (for example, capacity utilization up two months in a row) we are a long, long way from any tension on the line. As the graph below (from http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/) shows, ...

In August, the Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) rose 0.6%, following gains of 0.9% in July and 0.8% in June. This was slightly below the 0.7% consensus expectation, but on the other hand, the July number was revised up from 0.6%, so the gain was coming off a higher base. Five of the ten indicators were up on the month, three were down and two were unchanged. This marks the fifth month in a row that the index has been up since it bottomed out in March. Prior to that, it had fallen for 20 straight months -- one of the longest negative strings on record. The five components that were up, in order of their impact on the index, were: the vendor performance index, which rose to 57.1 from 52.0; the spread on 10-year Treasuries versus Fed Funds, which rose to 3.43% from ...

World stocks retreated further from last week’s 11-month high on Monday as lower energy and commodity prices and caution ahead of a Federal Reserve meeting and G20 summit prompted investors to trim risky trades.

Leaders of the Group of 20 meet on Thursday and Friday in Pittsburgh and U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday he would push world leaders for a reshaping of the global economy in response to the crisis.

World stocks, measured by MSCI have risen over 26 percent this year, recouping more than half of last year’s losses, underpinned by repeated pledges by G20 policymakers to keep emergency support for the economy in place.

“The market might look slightly overbought near term, but the economy is definitely improving, corporate profits are definitely improving, interest rates are staying low, valuations aren’t expensive,” said Nick Nelson, European equity strategist at UBS. MSCI world equity index <.MIWD00000PUS> fell 0.7 percent, while the

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