I was expecting quite a bit more, but perhaps should not be surprised at what was actually delivered. The National Retail Federation (NRF) after delaying its Black Friday retail spending estimates updated them later today for the now designated Thanksgiving Weekend. These new figures capture spending activity on both Thanksgiving Day itself as well as the much-discussed Cyber Monday. The [...]
As expected, Cyber Monday hit records all across the retail industry. According to Adobe Insights, sales recorded by online outlets, including those of traditional brick and mortar stores, hit $6.59 billion. That’s a record not just for a Cyber Monday but any single day in the internet’s two decades of mainstream usage. It was, Adobe said, a gain of 16.8% [...]
New home sales rose sharply again for the second consecutive month. After rising more than 18% in the month of September 2017 over August (subsequently revised down to 14%), sales rose another 6% month-over-month in October. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 685k, that’s the highest pace for any month going back exactly ten years to October 2007, a highly [...]
It is a common misperception that the Fed has in the past raised rates pushing the US economy into recession. The last time that was true was in 1979, when the Fed raised its Discount rate from 9.5% starting in June of that year to 13.0% the following March - right in the middle of the 1980 recession. It was [...]
Black Friday was once the king of all shopping. A retailer could make its year up on that one day, often by gimmicking its way to insane single-day volume. Those days, however, are certainly over. Though the day after Thanksgiving still means a great deal, as the annual flood of viral consumer brawl videos demonstrate, it’s just not what it [...]
Durable goods were boosted for a second month by the after-effects of Harvey and Irma. New orders excluding those from transportation industries rose 8.5% year-over-year in October 2017, a slight acceleration from the 6.5% average of the four previous months. Shipments of durable goods (ex transportation) also rose by 8% last month. Even with that slight quickening, these are not [...]
First Bernanke, now Yellen. As I wrote earlier today, there is a growing tendency to revise economic history at least as it applies to official actions. Ben Bernanke defends QE from the perspective of 2009 forward, as if 2008 was all just someone else’s problem irrelevant to the world that came after. In effectively resigning from the Fed Chair position [...]
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) estimates sales of existing homes rose 2% in October 2017 from a downwardly revised September estimate. The trade group tries its best to put recent results in the best possible terms, claiming in its press release that at 5.48 million (SAAR) the number of resales is “their strongest pace since June.” That’s technically true [...]
The former Federal Reserve Chairman doth protest too much, methinks. The answer to why Ben Bernanke is still defending QE is obvious. Had it worked, I mean really worked, he would be today universally hailed as the greatest monetary steward since Bagehot. Though he wrote a book trying to cast himself in that way, the rest of the world just [...]
It's actually quite difficult to answer the question posed in the title, which in itself is a clue. What we know for sure is what does not count as reserves for a non-reservable currency system. It's that contradiction that sets off the often graphic misconceptions. Quantitative easing has been described as printing money. That’s certainly what central banks wish for [...]
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