- People variously comment on the wonderful charts that appear on Mises.org. Frank Shostak and Sean Corrigan do their own, but many of the others come from a fabulous resource for free data and charts: www.economagic.com. Try it out!
- Everyone in Europe seems so unhappy about the dollar’s slide.
- www.Money.Cnn.com is suddenly worried that the entire world economy is heavily dependent on US consumer spending, which in turn is driven by debt accumulation, much like the US federal budget.
- Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor sees nothing but bad news going into the G-8 Summit.
- USAToday claims that the Fed is likely to cut rates again.
- If you can stand more bad news, Reuters talks of “mass layoffs”: “The BLS said there were 1,576 mass layoffs in April, up from 1,507 in April 2002.
- And China has a banking problem: “The four biggest banks--Industrial Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Agricultural Bank of China--are struggling with the legacy of years of forced lending to unprofitable state-owned enterprises. China bailed out these four banks in 1998, providing 270 billion yuan ($32.6 billion) of new capital and helping shift 1.4 trillion yuan of loans to asset management companies. By the end of 2001, the government estimated the lenders still had 1.7 trillion yuan in bad loans... Another bailout may be needed as the banks get ready to present their books during initial public share sales in the next three years, said Wei Yen, who tracks China’s banks at Moody’s Investors Service in Hong Kong. ‘It is nearly impossible for the banks to sell shares before 2006, unless there is a government bailout,’ he said.”
