Wednesday, March 18, 2009

How am I doing - Part Deux

Here's my second self-report card on my economic predictions as I amended them in early February 2009.

"My prediction for a market move starting in mid-Q1 2009 was wrong. It is now mid-Q1 2009 and the Dow is, in fact, still declining. I'll push this out to the end of Q1."

It seems like I got close on this one. The market has been in a week-long rally and only today is it seeming to make a correction, which is probably mostly profit taking from the rally. There are many indicators of macro economic improvement although we have an awful long way to go to pull ourselves out of this hole.

"The return to growth will be weak at first (maybe 1 percent in all of 2009) but will pick up speed in 2010 as the Federal Reserves money printing takes hold. (I just looked at the Monetary Base numbers for 2009 and the almost-no-growth line up until August 2008 has been replaced with positively explosive growth since then. The Federal Reserve was truly asleep at the wheel regarding the Monetary Base this year --- but at least they seem to have awakened now."

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/fredgraph?chart_type=line&s[1][id]=BASE&s[1][range]=5yrs

Check out this link from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. The monetary base grew explosively from September 2008 into January 2009. Then the growth of the base trailed off, increased again, and is now trailing off again. I wish I had enough insight into the Fed's activity to understand why they let MB decline at all but they did.

Also, for what it's worth, I'm having trouble getting a link to the monetary base velocity charts on the Fed's web site. I can say from memory that the velocity was declining substantially in late 2008. This tracks with the common view that the Fed is pumping out money but the banks weren't lending. From memory, the velocity picked up substantially into February and March. When I can get the link to work, I'll come back and edit this post.

Without the velocity (the lending by banks of the money they get from the Fed), all the Fed pumping won't do any good. That's the wild card in my thoughts on the macro economics of this recession.

Finally, the prediction I didn't publish is that the US unemployment rate would grow to 8.5 percent. I write this only to show you how painstakingly honest I am. I could have ignored what will obviously be a bad call. At this writing it is 8.1 percent and only a fool will say it won't go higher. I'm guessing 9 to 9.5 and I'm hoping for nine. Many in the pundit class are talking double digits but I'm not sure how they get to that number.

So, I'm pretty happy with my revised prediction. I think the market will continue the rally in fits and starts through April, then will decline again before finally going into bull territory in late 2009 as the growth becomes evident going into 2010.

Let's see how the adjusted prediction pans out. Oh, and I need to work out a better way to keep a scorecard on myself. Wish me luck on that one.

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