Reuters is quoting President Obama: “One of the challenges that we’ve got to address internationally is currency rates and how they match up to make sure that our goods are not artificially inflated in price and their goods are artificially deflated in price. That puts us at a huge competitive disadvantage.” Pimco’s Paul McCulley listed this as one of the key issues for 2010: The first issue is the peg between the Chinese yuan and the U.S

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Obama Vows to Address Yuan Exchange Rate Issue

Electronic throttle systems are under review by U.S. safety officials as a possible cause of sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles, as alleged in at least seven lawsuits

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Toyota’s Electronics Said to Be a Focus of U.S. Recall Probe

From Jon Prior at HousingWire: Mortgage Delinquencies Pass 10%: LPS Home-loan delinquency rates in the US reached 10% in December, up from the record-high 9.97% in November, according to Lender Processing Services … which provides data on mortgage performance. Accounting for foreclosures in the pipeline, the total non-current rate stands at 13.3% ….

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LPS: Mortgage Delinquencies Reach 10%

The new book Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Economic Growth , by Christine Greenhalgh & Mark Rogers, looks interesting: What drives innovation?

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New Book: Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Economic Growth

The Federal Trade Commission announced another gunpoint “settlement” today against a physician group. What distinguishes this case is the FTC now expressly states that refusal to accept federal Medicare price controls is itself a form of illegal price fixing. Roaring Fork Valley Physicians, I.P.A., an 85-physician group in Colorado, faced the FTC’s wrath because of its members’ “concerted refusals to deal” with HMOs and other insurers that are protected like endangered species by federal antitrust officials

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Refusal to Price Fix = Price Fixing

From earlier this morning … the MBA reports: Mortgage Applications Increase in Latest MBA Weekly Survey The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, increased of 21.0 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier

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MBA: Mortgage Applications Increase to mid-December Levels

This is another weak service report. According to this survey, the service sector barely expanded in January, and employment also contracted in the non-manufacturing sector “for the 25th consecutive month”. From the Institute for Supply Management: January 2010 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business® In January, the NMI registered 50.5 percent, indicating growth in the non-manufacturing sector after two months of contraction .

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ISM Non-Manufacturing Shows Slight Expansion in January

President Barack Obama plans to meet with the Dalai Lama later this month, ignoring Chinese warnings that it would further damage U.S.-China ties already strained by a proposed arms sales to Taiwan and a dispute over censorship of the Internet.

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Friction over Obama Plan to Meet Dalai Lama

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona The global manufacturing expansion continued to gather momentum in January. Coming in at 56.1, up from 54.6 in December, the JPMorgan Global Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index registered its highest reading for five and a half years.

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Global Manufacturing Continued Its Expansion In January

John Murray Brown writes in today’s FT on the Irish situation – you can read it here . Nouriel Roubini and Arnab Das write on the Greek situation and the implications for the euro area: you can read it here .

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The De-Linking of Ireland and the Southern Periphery

The ESRI has published “ An Economic Approach to Municipal Waste Management Policy in Ireland “. The Report provides a roadmap for managing municipal waste in an efficient way that minimises the costs to society. The Report states that Ireland is at an important junction in municipal waste management policy

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Municipal Waste Management Policy

Writing in the Guardian, Fred Pearce uses the demographic situation in East Germany, defined by the mass emigration of its residents–esppecially well-qualified women–to the West, to wonder if East Germany will be the model for Europe in the generations to come.Asia Times’ Christian Segura writes about the Tibetan diaspora in Beijing; Tibet, it seems, is still marked by net emigration, not the

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Some more links

A couple of key points: The ABI is forecasting more personal bankruptcy filings in 2010 than in 2009 (just over 1.4 million) Filings were down 10% from December, but up 15% from January 2009. From the American Bankruptcy Institute: January Consumer Bankruptcy Filings Decrease 10 Percent from December The 102,254 consumer bankruptcies filed in January represented a 10 percent decrease nationwide from the 113,274 consumer filings recorded in December, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) relying on data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center (NBKRC). NBKRC’s data also showed that the January 2010 consumer filings represented a 15 percent increase over the 88,773 consumer filings recorded in January 2009

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ABI: Personal Bankruptcy Filings Up 15% from January 2009

The Indian economy grew 7.9 percent year on year in the July-to-September quarter, far better than most other countries. But inflation is rising, with food prices in particular rising sharply. The inflation rate in December was 7.3 …

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Market Skeptics: Violence Erupts Against Rising Food Prices In …

The Census Bureau reported the homeownership and vacancy rates for Q4 2009 this morning. Here are a few graphs ..

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Q4: Homeownership Rate Declines to Early 2000 Level

by Edward Hugh: Barcelona José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, said in Davos this week : “We are a serious country and we will fulfil our promises.” With these words Spain’s Prime Minister sought, during his visit to Davos last week to reassure international investors that Spain, despite the severity of the recession it is currently suffering, and the major challenges facing its banking system, is not about to become another Greece. Just to prove the point he had Labour Minister Celestino Corbacho and Economy Minister Elena Salgado announce in short order that a) Spanish citizens are going to work two more years each in the longer term, and b) face continuing and sweeping cuts in services and increases in taxes in the short term

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Spain Is A Serious Country

Luxury retail in India has been a fascinating journey from a socio-economic perspective. Projected as the next China for luxury goods consumption, the Indian economy has evoked a lot of interest globally given its statistics of some of …

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India to emerge as a hub of luxury goods brands | Neytri.com

From Dina ElBoghdady and Dan Keating at the WaPo: Rising FHA default rate foreshadows a crush of foreclosures The share of borrowers who are falling seriously behind on loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration jumped by more than a third in the past year … About 9.1 percent of FHA borrowers had missed at least three payments as of December, up from 6.5 percent a year ago, the agency’s figures show.

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FHA to Pay Out Claims on 25% of 2007 and 2008 Loans

The 1937-1938 dip was not the product of tight fiscal and monetary policy, but of excessive government regulation and loose monetary policy. We must clear away the misconception that, without deficit spending and easy credit, the market will fail. FULL ARTICLE by Jonahtan M.

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Dangerous Lessons of 1937

The news that the government has negotiated a 40% reduction in prices with the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association for 300 off-patent drugs (announcements here and here ) got the warm fuzzy feel-good treatment on last night’s RTE News at 9 (the word patent did not make its way into the two-minute report).   This is, of course, undoubtedly good news, particularly for those with regular prescriptions for these drugs.

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Price Reductions on Off-Patent Drugs

[Excerpted from chapter 2 of Society Without Coercion , 1969] Government is, by definition, a “social monopoly of force.” The greatest instrumentalities of force which have ever been assembled, the police forces and armies of the world, are at the disposal of governments.

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The Nature and Morality of Government

From the Las Vegas Sun: Short sales soar while foreclosure sales slacken (ht sportsfan) Short sales averaged about 7 percent to 8 percent of total [Las Vegas] existing-home closings in early 2009, but averaged 22 percent of the market by the end of the year and in early January … “We have seen a decrease in foreclosure activity in Las Vegas, which was puzzling to us,” said Daren Bloomquist, marketing manager for California-based RealtyTrac, which monitors foreclosures in Nevada

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"Short Sales Soar"

As part of the annual budget, the Obama Administration released the underlying economic assumptions too (see Page 13 of PDF) For GDP, they are forecasting real GDP growth of 2.7% in 2010, followed by 3.8%, 4.3% and 4.2% in 2013.

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Obama Administration Unemployment Forecast

More from the Q4 GDP underlying detail tables … Note: Residential investment (RI), according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), includes new single family structures, multifamily structures, home improvement, broker’s commissions, and a few minor categories. Back in Q4 2008 – for the first time ever – investment in home improvements exceeded investment in new single family structures

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Residential Investment Components in Q4

Jeff Frankel has a piece on what Chile can teach the rest of the world here . The Irish fiscal debate could usefully move in this direction. The piece is also relevant to the thread below on economic expertise, and to broader debates about whether technical expertise in general is useful to policy making, and is sufficiently appreciated and availed of in Ireland

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Chilean lessons

From the Fed: The January 2009 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices The January survey indicated that commercial banks generally ceased tightening standards on many loan types in the fourth quarter of last year but have yet to unwind the considerable tightening that has occurred over the past two years. The net percentages of banks reporting tighter loan terms continued to trend lower. Banks reported that loan demand from both businesses and households weakened further , on net, over the survey period

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Fed: Banks Cease Tightening Standards, Loan Demand Weakens Further

Here are graphs of office, mall and lodging investment through Q4 2009 based on the underlying detail data released by the BEA … Click on graph for larger image in new window

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Q4: Office, Mall and Lodging Investment

Residential construction spending was off slightly in December, and is now about 10% above the bottom in June 2009. I expect some growth in residential spending in 2010, but the increases will probably be sluggish until the large overhang of existing inventory is reduced. Non-residential increased slightly in December, but the trend is clearly down

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Construction Spending Declines in December

When the Progressives, 100 years ago or so, made a push for universal compulsory schooling, and the state marched ahead to crowd out as many private alternatives to public school as possible, it was widely seen as a mechanism for social uplift. What the good rhetoric masked was the sheer totalitarian nature of the combination of state schooling plus compulsory attendance. In effect, it amounted to the nationalization of children

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U.S. Judge Grants Political Asylum to German Homeschoolers

Hayek is not only the leading free-market economist; he has also led the way in attacking the mathematical models and the planning pretensions of the would-be “scientists,” and in integrating economics into a wider libertarian social philosophy. FULL ARTICLE by Murray N.

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Hayek and the Nobel Prize