Amerika

As you may know, I don’t think this “recession” is anything more than the market deflating overvalued assets from the Clinton era.

Here are some signs of recovery:

• The Conference Board’s index of leading economic indicators has risen for two months in a row.
• Consumer prices rose in January — the first monthly gain in six months.
• Thanks to lower interest rates, applications for both new mortgages and refinancings of existing mortgages are rising.
• The decline in consumer credit moderated in the latest month.
• The 3-month London interbank offered rate, a measure of banks’ willingness to lend to each other, has dropped to 1.2% from close to 5% a number of weeks ago.
• The corporate-bond markets are thawing out, too; some $127 billion in dollar-denominated debt was issued in January, the most for any month since last May.

MarketWatch