September 20

Its over! The recession, that is; in fact, it ended June 2009.
A trough in business activity occurred in the U.S. economy in June 2009. NBER.

The committee decided that any future downturn of the economy would be a new recession and not a continuation of the recession that began in December 2007. The basis for this decision was the length and strength of the recovery to date.

so, now that the U.S. is not still in recession, Gary Shilling evaluates The chances of a double-dip, via Credit Writedowns.

this is both worth a laugh, and has some material worth some thought:
Postal at the bank. Bruce Krasting.

Flow of funds data came out recently, showing aggregate private debt to GDP ratio has fallen to 267%, which is still very very high, but down significantly from peak of 298%

But in Defaults account for most of pared down debt, the WSJ shows how the U.S. consumer is "delevering" --- virtually all debt reduction is due to loan charge-offs

Retirement on hold: American workers $6 trillion short. Scott Cohn, CNBC.

other data:

not much data today, just NAHB, which was a bit weaker than expected, staying at 13; and Canadian wholesale sales for July, which was down for the 4th straight month and 5 of last 6

tomorrow we get Canadian CPI, expected to blip up to 1.9% from 1.8% YoY, while core CPI is expected to stay steady at 1.6%; in the U.S., we'll get housing starts and building permits and the (probably uneventful) FOMC decision

on Wednesday we'll see how Canadian retail sales did in July; on Thursday we'll get U.S existing home sales and on Friday we'll see how new home sales and durable goods orders fared in the U.S. in August

contrary indicators: Chinese stocks have been a pretty good leading indicator of global equities, and the Shanghai Composite index has gone nowhere for two months; but the CRB has been steadily heading higher (up 11%) over the last 2 months, and is at its highest level since May 2008, while copper (the commodity with a PhD in economics) has also been trending higher (though less steadily), up 27% since early June; meanshile, PIGS spreads are out, but the VIX is down