Howard Voyles - HousingMatrix.com - 19 Nov 2010 - We are nearing one of the biggest shopping days of the year: Black Friday, the super sale day following Thanksgiving. This event marks the start of the annual Holiday spending season.

So, it is appropriate to examine how consumers are fairing and check how economic expectations are developing.

HS Dent - 16 Nov 2010 07:21 AM PST - Are we seeing the first signs?  The Fed gave us the “number” a couple of weeks ago, just after the election.  $600 billion seemed not to hot, not too cold.  But the papers and airwaves are filled with discontent over the policy in general, to the point where Fed Governors Yellen and Dudley held seperate interviews to specifically claim that the Fed measures are NOT meant to devalue the dollar.  Now, stop your laughing.  Or crying.  Or whatever your response was to the bald-faced lies.  It doesn’t really matter what the jaw-boning of the Fed Governors is, the impact of printing trillions of new dollars is to devalue those in circulation.  The real question is, has this policy created the impact the Fed wanted, and will it have an impact going forward?

HS Dent - 16 Nov 2010 07:32 AM PST - GM is going public.  Sort of.  It’s already public, in as much as we the taxpayers own 61% of it.  Which brings up an interesting point.  GM owns nothing of itself.  It is not diluting existing ownership.  Instead, it is basically jumping through hoops (and paying millions in fees) so that ownership can be transferred from the US govt, the Canadian govt, and unions, to private shareholders.  While in most IPOs insiders do sell shares, there is usually a benefit to the company itself in terms of raising funds to expand their business or whatever.  Of course GM doesn’t need money, we took care of that one.

Howard Voyles - HousingMatrix.com - November 16, 2010 - QE1: Is it the big British Passenger Liner or some obscure planet in the Main Belt? Yes, but not economically speaking. The same is true of QE2, to some it may be the name sake of the big ship QE1, but not economically speaking.

Quantitative Easing is a monetary policy or instance of increasing the money supply by pre-determined quantity via open market operations, as an economist would say.

In economic terms this is code for 'turning on the printing press' or in extreme circumstances, governments flooding the financial system with money, easing pressure on banks by giving them extra capital.