In the chaotic days of the early “recovery”, those opposed to the Federal Reserve’s response largely fell into the wrong camp. The central bank had done too much, they claimed. Never mind how the first global panic in four generations had developed and then crushed the global economy, such deflation was over to be taken apart by rapid inflation if [...]
As I wrote yesterday, “In the West, consumer prices overall are pushed around by oil. In the East, by food.” In neither case is inflation buoyed by “money printing.” Central banks both West and East are doing things, of course, but none of them amount to increasing the effective supply of money. Failure of inflation, more so economy, the predictable [...]
The US federal government is shut down and certain economic data accounts are being left to go without scheduled updates, things like US trade provided by the Census Bureau. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more watched series aren’t among the forgotten, however. The monthly payroll report would be compiled and released even during a nuclear attack. Yes, it really is [...]
We’ve got to change our ornithological nomenclature. Hawks become doves because they are chickens underneath. Doves became hawks for reasons they don’t really understand. A fingers-crossed policy isn’t a robust one, so there really was no reason to expect the economy to be that way. In January 2019, especially the past few days, there are so many examples of flighty [...]
I really like Joe Calhoun’s theoretical framework in explaining what we try to do here. Like a game of Poker, we are playing against everyone else at the table unlike Black Jack where you are largely playing yourself. It helps explain why I can say the FOMC is irrelevant while at the same time I spend so much time (all [...]
And like that, it’s all different. For more than a year, two years, really, we’ve heard constantly about wage pressures. The US economy buoyed by several domestic factors as well as globally synchronized growth was in danger of getting too far out of hand. The unemployment rate said it was time – three years ago in 2015. The lower the [...]
After a horrible December and a rough start to the year, as if manna from Heaven the clouds parted and everything seemed good again. Not 2019 this was early February 2015. If there was a birth date for Janet Yellen’s “transitory” canard it surely came within this window. It didn’t matter that currencies had crashed and oil, too, or that [...]
Just as there is gradation for positive numbers, there is color to negative ones, too. On the plus side, consistently small increments marked by the infrequent jump is never to be associated with a healthy economy let alone one that is booming. A truly booming economy is one in which the small positive numbers are rare. The recovery phase preceding [...]
Ambiguity favors the path of least resistance. If there isn’t any direct refutation of the thing everyone believes in, everyone will continue to believe in that thing and only that thing. Human nature. In economy terms, people respond near exclusively to negative numbers. This is less evolution and more a process of modern times. There is a very strong attachment [...]
These transition periods are often just this sort of whirlwind. One day the economy looks awful, the next impervious to any downside. Today, it has been the latter with the BLS providing the warm comfort of headline payrolls. For now, it won’t matter how hollow. Yesterday, completely different story. Apple got it started downhill and the ISM pushed it off [...]
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