Doomsday Scenario: Lame Treasury auctions, travel numbers shot down

Posted Mar 25th 2009 5:40PM by Alex Salkever
Filed under: Bad News, Recession

Another day, more wonderful news. If the rally last week left you feeling peppy, alas, global debt markets didn't share your enthusiasm -- witness the extremely tepid reception a new round of U.S. and U.K. debt offerings got from buyers today. Air travel numbers were horrific, indicating, by some opinions, a dire summer for the perennially strapped industry.

Then there is the case of Paul Volcker, the only former Fed Chair alive to have faced anything like the current situation (when he faced down stagflation three decades ago). Mr. Volcker, an eminence grise at 81, has largely been marginalized from economic discussions with the Administration at this point, according to Naked Capitalism. A very bad sign, indeed. IBM outsourced ~~laid off~~ a bunch of positions to India. As Zero Hedge points out, this is part of an ongoing global labor arbitrage involving moving all possible positions to lower cost locations. Good for IBM, tough on American workers right now but hey, that's capitalism, right?

Alex Salkever is Director of Research at Piqqem.com, a stock investing community powered by the Wisdom of Crowds

Tags: air travel, depression, doomsday, Fed, federal reserve, FederalReserve, recession, volcker

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

3-26-2009 @ 6:27AM

al coholic said...

It's sad that the very best economic scenrio we can envision consists of future runaway inflation easing the burden of our multi-trillion national debt.