Here are the notes I sent to the CNBC producers for tonight’s show:
On Corporate Bond Spreads:
1) Corporate spreads are at post-collapse lows, but mortgage spreads are at all-time lows. There actually is an implosion of spread assets outstanding: the total universe of non-Treasury securities fell by 1% during 2009, compared to a gain of 8% [...]

Pardon my gloom, but it’s not clear to me where an employment recovery will come from–at least in the United States. All the indicators we have show that employment is scraping along the bottom. With 20% of the United States working-age population un- or underemployed, according to the Gallup Poll’s massive survey of 20,000 households, [...]

It’s going to be tough for the S&P to break above its present range. Last month we saw the equity market show extreme sensitivity to news from the Federal Reserve. It rallied when the Fed indicated that the economy was too weak to permit a cut in interest rates. Why should that be the case? There is actually a [...]

Greek bonds today traded at around 6.3%. With a total float of $402 billion, Greece’s annual debt service bill would be $26 billion if the whole debt were financed at this yield. That’s a bit over $6,500 a year in annual debt service for Greeks who actually have a job (4.95 million workforce minus the [...]

Over at Forbes Online, James Kaplan of the research firm Audit Integrity observes:
The 20 banks on our list …exhibit the following alarming levels of risk:
–Commercial real estate loans comprising a median 26% of total loans
–Commercial real estate loans equal to a median of 170% of Tier 1 capital (defined as equity capital and undisclosed reserves)
–A [...]

Larry Kudlow asked whom I’d pick to replace retiring Fed Vice-Chairman Donald Kohn on his CNBC show yesterday evening. My advice: find a hedge fund manager who knows where the bodies are buried, and how the Dr. Frankensteins of Wall Street make monsters out of the body parts. Think of FDR hiring Joe Kennedy to [...]

RBS economists writing on the FT Alphaville blog offer an interesting (but in my view flawed) predictor of deflation: there’s too much capital stock relative to labor, so that companies will not invest. This is true, they observe, even if the overinvestment in structures is factored out. It’s an interesting take, and the conclusions probably are [...]

An old Far Side cartoon shows a cook about to throw lobsters into a kettle; a lobster says, “Auntie Em! Auntie Em! There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!” Americans (whom God looks out for along with drunks and small children, in the apocryphal words of Bismarck) are accustomed to happy endings [...]

This is NOT a business cycle: this is a one-time reversal of twenty years of inflation of the household balance sheet. An aging populationneeds a 10% savings rate (at least) to meet minimum funding requirements for the biggest retirement wave in US history (comparable to Japan’s retirement wave during the “lost decade” of the 1990s). [...]

On Larry Kudlow’s show last night (absent Larry, and off the usual channel due to the Olympics), I warned of negative surprises from employment.
And the Conference Board this morning was kind enough to validate this:
 
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — Confidence among U.S. consumers fell more than anticipated in February to the lowest level since April 2009 [...]