Having described the US as "worse than Japan in the 90s" during his last appearance, ECRI's Lakshman Achuthan remains adamant that (despite Bloomberg TV anchors' insistence that stocks are at all-time highs must mean something) the US has been in recession since last year and remains so. His comments that "you wouldn't have four years of zero-interest rate policy and quantitative easing if everything was okay," are as cogent now as then as he critically explains, as we have noted here and here, that the attention being paid to 'soft data' surveys (such as ISM) is entirely mistaken since ISM/PMIs are now negatively correlated to actual production. The data (hard data doesn't lie) in hand, he notes, suggest downward revisions and well within the range of a mild recession and "the market is disconnected."
1:00 ISM/PMI Debunking
1:50 How disconnected the markets are
2:20 The Secular challenge
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/QalqFPCfB0M/story01.htm Tyler Durden