The April Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation, had no increase or decrease from March. The reason was gasoline prices, which declined -2.6% from last month Below is the graph for CPI's monthly percentage change.
April 2012 Retail Sales increased 0.1%. Minus autos & parts, retail sales also increased 0.1%. March retail sales were revised down from 0.8% to 0.7%. Retail sales are up 6.4% from the same time last year. Retail sales are reported by dollars, not by volume, so dropping prices often reports as a decline in sales.
Your pedal extremities are colossal To me you look just like a fossil. – Fats Waller
Business executives like to talk about their “footprint”. When JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America were racing all around the United States to see which could be the first to have a full national presence in every important market, they would talk about how their footprint was expanding state by state. Then it was on to establish a full global footprint, including in all key emerging markets, which supposedly are going to provide double-digit earnings growth for these banks during the next twenty years.
Did you know, beyond closed doors, there is a massive trade agreement being crafted? It's called TPP or Trans Pacific Partnership and this one makes NAFTA look like the stepping stone that it is. This is one bad mother.
This is a trade agreement between Chile, Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam and the United States. Japan as well as China may also join. The countries involved isn't the problem. What's being negotiated is.
If you are the CEO of a major global bank and you have to announce a $2.0 billion trading loss, you will no doubt feel that the shareholders, regulators, and reporters are all against you. But if you announce that the loss occurred in a portfolio that just six weeks earlier was the subject of criticism in the press, and which you described as nothing more than “a tempest in a teapot”, you are entitled to feel that the gods are against you.
The gods definitely have it in for Jaime Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the legendary “fortress balance sheet” bank that prides itself on having avoided problems during the housing bust and credit crisis of 2007-2008. Someone inside the bank blew a large cannonball through the bank’s fortress walls, and it seems likely to have been “the Whale” of the credit derivatives market, JP Morgan’s Bruno Michel Iksil.
What a surprise, that biggest fighter against financial regulation of them all, JPMorgan Chase accrued a $2 billion dollar loss:
The $2 billion loss came from a complicated trading strategy that involved derivatives, financial instruments that derive their value from the prices of securities and other assets. JPMorgan said the derivatives trades were part of a hedge, meaning they were set up to offset potential losses on the bank’s large holdings of bonds and loans.
That loss was caused by derivatives and credit default swaps and in part due to a Value at Risk model. This is the same type of model which was part of the financial crisis and has been warned about repeatedly for not being mathematically complex enough to base one's gambling debts on. No surprise a VaR model was behind the loss.
It produced large losses even without extreme movements in the derivatives markets or underlying bond markets.
The U.S. March 2012 trade deficitjumped $6.41 billion to $51.83 billion in a month. This is a 14.1% monthly increase in the trade deficit. Exports increased $5.28 billion, a 2.9% increase from last month. Imports increased $11.69 billion, which is a 5.15% increase from February.
JOLTS stands for Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The March 2012 statistics show there were 3.39 official unemployed people hunting for a job to every position available*. There were 3,737,000 job openings for March 2012, an increase of 4.83%, from the previous month of 3,565,000. The press shouts this is the largest number of jobs openings in four years, that's actually wrong. This is the highest number of job openings since July 2008. We were 8 months into the great recession and there were way less people needing a job in July 2008. Openings are still way below pre-recession levels of 4.7 million. Job openings have increased 71% from their July 2009 trough, yet opportunities are still way below the 1.8 persons per job opening at the start of the recession, December 2007. Below is the graph of March official unemployed, 12.673 million, per job opening.
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What a surprise, that biggest fighter against financial regulation of them all, JPMorgan Chase accrued a 
That loss was caused by derivatives and credit default swaps and in part due to a 
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