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Latest blog posts from Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog

Another 450,000 Jobs Lost in June
Nonfarm payroll employment continued to decline in June (by 467,000), and the unemployment rate increased to changed at 9.5% (with a total of 14.7 million unemployed), the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Job losses were widespread across the major...
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Published 10 hours ago

China Manufacturing Expands for the Fourth Straight Month
China Manufacturing Expands a Fourth Month China’s manufacturing expanded for a fourth month as government stimulus spending and record bank lending sparked a recovery in the world’s third-biggest economy. … China’s economy may keep improving in the third and fourth quarters, enabling the...
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Published 2 days ago

Increasing USA Saving Rate is a Good Sign
Surging U.S. Savings Rate Reduces Dependence on China Government data today showed that the household savings rate rose to 6.9 percent in May, the highest since December 1993, as personal spending increased less than incomes. The rate in April 2008 was zero. Most of the rise in income in May was...
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Published 4 days ago

Canada’s Sound Regulation Resulted in a Sound Banking System Even During the Credit Crisis
The IMF 2009 country report on Canada discusses there current economic condition. As part of that they explore the success Canada had in regulating their banking sector (which stands in stark contract to the catastrophic regulatory failures in the USA and Europe). And also provide ample...
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Published a week ago

Kiva Opens to USA Entrepreneur Loans
Kiva is one of my favorite charities, as I have mentioned several times. They provide a platform that connects those with funds to lend to entrepreneurs. This week they added the ability to lend money to entrepreneurs in the USA. And they also added short webcasts to some of the entrepreneur...
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Published 2 weeks ago

The Relative Economic Position of the USA is Likely to Decline
The economic clout of the USA has been huge since the end of World War II. The relative position has been decreasing recently with the rise of not only Europe and Japan but Korea, China, India, Brazil and many more. This means the risks to the USA of failing to deal with perennial problems (the...
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Published 2 weeks ago

Y-Combinator’s Fresh Approach to Entrepreneurship
Four Lessons from Y-Combinator’s Fresh Approach to Innovation Y Combinator’s basic approach is to give promising ideas a small amount of seed capital (the average investment is less than $25,000), then house those startups for a short period of time. The startups get the capital, strategic...
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Published 3 weeks ago

Saving Spurts as Spending Slashed
One factor you must understand when evaluating economic data is that the data is far from straight forward. Even theoretically it is often confusing what something like “savings rate” should represent. And even if that were completely clear the ability to get data that accurately measures...
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Published 3 weeks ago

USA Unemployment Rate Jumps to 9.4%
Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000 in May, about half the average monthly decline for the prior 6 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. The unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.9 to 9.4 percent. Steep job losses...
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Published 4 weeks ago

Paying for Over-spending
Trading down Americans are rediscovering thrift. Retail sales fell by 11% from their peak in late 2007 to April 2009. Personal consumption has fallen 2.5% since last summer. … A recent Pew poll found that 21% of Americans planned to grow their own vegetables, 16% had held a garage sale or sold...
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Published 4 weeks ago