Travis Berge and Oscar Jorda of the University of California, Davis have an interesting new paper on statistical criteria for distinguishing economic expansions from recessions.

Berge and Jorda evaluate rules of the form that would declare the economy to be in a recession when some indicator Yt falls below a specified threshold c, for example, saying that the economy is in a recession whenever GDP growth comes in below -0.6%. For any choice of the threshold c, there is some observed fraction of observations for which the economy wasn't in a recession and yet Yt was less than c (the false positive rate), and a fraction of the time when the economy was in a recession and Yt was less than c (the true positive rate). By choosing a lower value for c, there will be fewer false positives and fewer true positives.

The receiver operating characteristics curve

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I've written in various places about the coup in Honduras, and stated in radio interviews that I support Washington's stance and the efforts of Oscar Arias to bring resolution to the conflict and restore constitutional normality.  Even if Manuel "Mel" Zelaya broke the law while in office, the military had no right to handle the situation they way they did.  At the end of the day, we have taken one of the most deeply unpopular presidents of all of Latin America, and turned him into a martyr of democracy, thanks largely to the outrageous and obnoxious behavior of the interim government.  But whereas he could've succeeded dramatically if he played his cards right, Zelaya's behavior in exile has been far less than cooperative or exemplary, and a certain patron president appears to be goading him into the worst decisions.  But ...

Retail sales were better than expected in August, whether you count the Cash for Clunkers program or not, which likely helped Perry Ellis International, Inc. (PERY) with its more than 8% gain this afternoon.

< ?DART(15);?> However, apart from the macroeconomic news, this apparel company also recently reported it's fiscal second-quarter numbers and signed a deal with Pierre Cardin.

Earnings estimates for this top-performing Zacks #1 Rank company have moved sharply higher in the past month with strong analyst agreement.

In addition to PERY, there are 5 other names from the Textile-Apparel industry on today's Zacks #1 Rank List, which includes 225 names. Those other companies are G-III Apparel Group Ltd. (GIII), Guess?, Inc. (GES), Maidenform Brands, Inc. (MFB), Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation (PVH) and Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation (RL).

Volume today is at 145,000 shares, compared to the

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If you want to know what Russia's energy ambitions are in the emerging markets of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, I used to tell people that all you had to do was carefully track the travel schedule of Vladimir Putin.  Nowadays, the same can be said of the Energy Czar Igor Sechin, as his itinerary is bound to be connected with the signing of major deals.Case in point, yesterday afternoon, Russia's RIA Novosti Spanish wire service reported on the arrival of the Deputy Prime Minister and Rosneft Chairman to Caracas, Venezuela.  The reason for the trip, as duly reported by the state news agency, was to prepare for Hugo Chavez's upcoming visit to Moscow and a high-level inter-governmental ...

Editor's Note: I know many of you enjoy reading analysis of dividend-yielding stocks. Therefore, I am pleased to share with you this great article from Carla Pasternak.

Carla writes the Dividend Opportunities newsletter for our partner, StreetAuthority, and has some good insight on yields for the stocks within the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

-Charles Rotblut, CFA Senior Market Analyst, Zacks.com

The 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJI) sport some attractive yielding stocks -- many with more than twice the average yield of the S&P 500. But the question is: Which company has the safest dividend in the Dow? General Electric's (GE) double-digit dividend yield looked pretty juicy a few months ago -- that is, until they slashed it by -68%. And Citigroup (C), which recently got kicked out of the Dow, had a once-rich yield. Now its quarterly dividend payment stands at one lonely penny per share. But rest

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It’s a curious symptom of the consensus trance zombifying the American public and its auditors in the media that something like a “recovery” is now deemed to be underway. And, as events compel me to repeat in this space, it begs the question: recovery to what?

To Wall Street booking stupendous profits by laundering “risk” out of bad loans with new issues of tranche-o-matic securitized paper? This I doubt, since there isn’t a pension fund left from San Jose to Bratislava that would touch this stuff with a stick, even if it could be turned out in collector’s editions of boxed sets.

Does it mean that American “consumers” (so-called) are awaited momentarily in the flat-screen TV sales parlors with their credit cards fanned-out like poker hands, ready for “action?” Not too likely with massive non-performance out in cardholder-land, and half the nation’s electronics inventory wending its way onto Craig’s List. Are

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I thought I was still asleep and merely dreaming when I opened up Barron’s and saw that the earnings of the S&P 500 dropped to $28.75, which is down from last week’s $45.95, which is down from last year’s $78.80.

In case you were wondering, this level of earnings is down to where it was in 1995, and at that time the S&P 500 was selling for about $450, versus today’s $770, and which makes the price-to-earnings soar to an almost-unheard-of 27! A P/E of 27! Hahahaha! So you can see why I thought I was dreaming!

This evaporation of earnings also probably explains why the S&P500 index is at $770.05, down from last year’s $1,353.11, meaning that if you had bought the index last year, you have lost almost half your money in nominal terms, and you have lost ever more when calculated in inflation-adjusted terms, as the dollar has lost

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Last Friday was the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. It seems we can’t escape looking back over our shoulders at the 1930s.

We teeter closer to the sequel no one wants to see: Great Depression II. We got horrible news on the job front last week. Unemployment climbed to 6.7% as the nation lost another half a million jobs in the month of November alone. It was the worst rack of numbers in 34 years. One in 10 American mortgages is now either behind on its payments or in foreclosure.

Businesses are cutting back. Consumers are cutting back. Commodity prices have collapsed. The stock market is down more than 40% this year. When we close out the books for 2008, you’ll have to go back to the 1930s to find a comparable disaster for stocks in a single year.

So I find myself looking back at the 1930s often these days.

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A very cool, very clever black man overcomes racism and ignorance to triumph over his detractors thanks to superior intellect and a methodical nature. No, not the Presidential election, but the plot of the multiple Oscar winning movie ‘In the Heat of the Night’, which was released over 40 years ago but resonates today on the cusp of a generational political shift in US politics. Having watched it again at the weekend, and amid the endless stream of apocalyptic economic comment (I’m a longtime fan of NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, but he’s becoming the Henry Blodget of the bear case, and we all know how that ended), Americans can feel justifiably proud that in a generation we have got to this point. It looks increasingly likely that the Democrats will seize not only the White House, but a filibuster proof majority in the Senate as well, …