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Sell W.R. Berkley (WRB)

It’s like some insurance industry version of “Night of the Living Dead.” Zombies keep eating insurance premium increases. In this case it’s not hordes of zombies that are the menace, but one great big one, American International Group (AIG). The crippled insurer,...

Job loss is slowing but not very quickly

Initial claims for unemployment–that’s the number of people filing claims for unemployment for the first time because they’ve just lost a job–fell by 33,000 from the previous week to just 521,000, according to data released this morning by the...

Payroll losses down–that's good. But consumer credit falls–that's bad–and so does the Baltic Dry index–that's bad too. The economic picture is clearly mixed

On Friday before the U.S. financial markets opened the Labor Department reported that only a  net 247,000 workers lost their jobs in June. That was a big decrease from the drop of 443,000 in June. And way better than the 325,000 decline that economists had been...

Testing the June highs–again

Looks like the stock market is thinking about taking a rest. As I noted way back on July 15 in the first column I wrote for this blog, “Why rallies fail,” I don’t think any rest is going to be a long one–there’s too much money on the...

The long-range problem

Green shoots won’t fix the long-term problems with our economy. Yes, the economy is getting less worse, less quickly. And yes, there are signs that the economy is starting to stabilize. And, yes, if you’re really optimistic you can see a day in 2010 (or 2011) when...