Good cheer, great hope, and a Merry Christmas to all!

It’s been another incredible year for new books in finance and economics. Before 2016 slips away, let’s revisit  some of the memorable titles that have appeared in The Capital Spectator’s weekly Book Bits column over the past 12 months. Here are five from the archives that, for one reason or another, inspire a second look. Next week, in Part II, I’ll highlight another five titles that arrived this year.
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It was a sure thing, a done deal, a safe bet. Or so we were told. But certainty that the UK would slide into a recession after voting in June to leave the European Union has, so far, turned out to be one more botched recession forecast. But all’s not lost since the erroneous prediction offers another teachable moment for reviewing best practices for analyzing the business cycle.
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The dark art/science of modeling the future has a shady reputation generally, and rightly so. But while extreme caution is always recommended when trafficking in prognostication, it’s a necessary evil to some extent. But some versions of this sorcery are a lesser evil than others. The best of the bunch is arguably combination forecasting, as decades of research advise. Let’s test the recommendation and see if the results hold up.
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The outlook for US growth in the fourth quarter is still muted vs. Q3’s pace, according to recent updates from various sources. The strong 3.2% increase in Q3 is expected to decelerate to around 2% and hold at that pace in Q1 2017, picking up slightly as the new year unfolds.
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A modestly positive economic trend held US recession risk at a low level through November. Although recent updates revealed some unexpected weakness in last month’s activity (retail sales and industrial production), the broad macro profile continues to reflect a growth bias that appears set to continue in the near term.
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Sellers took no prisoners in last week’s trading, leaving all the major asset classes lower after the five trading days through Dec. 16, based on a set of proxy ETFs. The all-inclusive declines mark the first time since March that red ink spared no corner of broadly defined global markets for the weekly accounting.
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● The Activist Director: Lessons from the Boardroom and the Future of the Corporation
By Ira M. Millstein
Summary via publisher (Columbia University Press)
Some of the worst corporate meltdowns over the past sixty years can be traced to passive directors who favored operational shortcuts over quality growth strategies. Thinking primarily about placating institutional investors, selective stockholders, proxy advisors, and corporate management, these inattentive and deferential board members have relied on short-term share price increases to sustain their companies long term. Driven by a desire for prosperity, not posterity, these actions can doom any company.
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The day after the Federal Reserve lifted interest rates, the benchmark 10-year Treasury vaulted to a new two-year-plus high of 2.60% on Thursday (Dec. 15), based on daily data from Treasury.gov. The latest surge widens the gap between the current yield and the record low of 1.37% that was touched just five months earlier, on July 8.
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The Federal Reserve announced an increase in interest rates yesterday, nudging its target rate up by 25 basis points to a 0.50%-to-0.75% range. The central bank’s revised economic projections were slightly more hawkish too. Meantime, the government yesterday reported weaker-than-expected numbers for retail sales and industrial production in November, fueling debate about the wisdom of tightening monetary policy.
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