New home sales rose almost 20% in September 2017 from August 2017. In just the one month, the pace of sales surged from a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 561k to 667k. The latter monthly estimate was the highest since 2007, therefore much is being made of that comparison. As usual, it’s a false one. Given the scale of the housing [...]
Economic growth is subject to gradation. There is almost no purpose in making such a declaration, for anyone with common sense knows intuitively that there is a difference between robust growth and just positive numbers. Yet, the biggest mistake economists and policymakers made in 2014 was to forget that differences exist between even statistics all residing on the plus side. [...]
Japan is hot, really hot. Stocks are up to level not seen since 1996 (Nikkei 225). Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called snap elections in Parliament to secure a supermajority and it worked. Things seem to be sparkling all over the place, with the arrow pointing up: "Hopes for a global economic recovery and US shares' strength are making fund managers [...]
The most significant part of China’s 19th Party Congress ended in the usual anticlimactic fashion. These events are for show, not debate. Like any good trial lawyer will tell you, you never ask a question in court that you don’t already know the answer to. For China’s Communists, that meant nominating Xi Jinping’s name to be written into the Communist [...]
PART 3 here PART 2 here PART 1 here
The Chinese have been on a UST buying spree of late, having announced to the world several months into it that they were intent on keeping it going. The idea in publicly endorsing and really highlighting their official activity was as a currency policy – to stabilize CNY against its highly disruptive tendency toward devaluation (which isn’t really devaluation). How [...]
The Treasury International Capital (TIC) report produced somewhat of an anomaly in its update for August 2017. There was a lot going on during that month, mostly as UST yields fell (even though interest rates have nowhere to go but up, supposedly) while CNY continued its blistering ascent. As to the latter, it was quite clear by then Chinese actions [...]
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported today that sales of existing homes (resales) were up slightly in September 2017 on a monthly basis. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 5.39 million last month, that was practically unchanged from the 5.35 million estimate for August that was the lowest in a year. On an annual basis, resales in September were [...]
It has been an unbelievably busy week on many fronts. Overshadowed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Austrian elections was continued “dollar” deterioration in FX. Further down the line than that, though in many respects related to it, was the UK government announcing the disappearance of half a trillion pounds. The news didn’t make much imprint in America, but it [...]
Who President Trump ultimately picks as the next Federal Reserve Chairman doesn’t really matter. Unless he goes really far afield to someone totally unexpected, whoever that person will be will be largely more of the same. It won’t be a categorical change, a different philosophical direction that is badly needed. Still, politically, it does matter to some significant degree. It’s [...]
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