For such an important set of data, the PCE stuff continues to suggest a whole lot of capriciousness. There has been a tendency to drastically revise figures such that they change not in the small ways regular revisions are supposed to produce. The whole purpose of especially benchmark revisions is to calculate a more accurate number. In the past few [...]
Activist hedge fund manager Bill Ackman succeeded in 2013 in ousting Procter & Gamble’s CEO Bob McDonald. It was noteworthy at the time because the company issued a strange memo repeating often verbatim answers to questions it posed to itself. Among them was if Mr. McDonald was fired or, as had been relayed publicly, he voluntarily retired. The memo merely [...]
When the Mario Draghi as head of the ECB first introduced negative rates in early June 2014, his reasoning was very clear. As he said in the opening of his statement imposing NIRP on Europe, “Today, we decided on a combination of measures to provide additional monetary policy accommodation and to support lending to the real economy.” The way in [...]
Inflation in Europe was in July 2017 once again underwhelming. Eurostat’s HICP inflation index grew at a 1.3% annual rate for the second straight month. Other than for February 2017, the inflation rate has been less than the ECB’s 2% target for four and a half years. During that time, Europe’s central bank has vastly expanded its liquidity facilities (twice) [...]
Real Gross Domestic Product expanded by 2.54% in Q2 2017, below most estimates including the final one from the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model. That latter method was close once again in its final days (+2.8%), but earlier in the quarter was predicting GDP growth of 4.3%. That would have been like what many people were thinking after another awful first [...]
In September 2016, Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees. These sorts of mass layoffs have become common in banking throughout the post-crisis era, especially those years of the “rising dollar.” This was different, however, as Wells was not cutting back in capacity but dealing with the aftermath of being far too aggressive. These employees were found to have opened secret and [...]
The entry of the United States into World War I placed a heavy financial burden on the government. The scale of such encumbrance was at the time almost unthinkable, and today is incomprehensible. Federal government expenditures in 1916 were all of $734 million, with $125 million financed by the new income tax authorized a few years prior by the 16th [...]
Durable goods orders were up a seasonally-adjusted 6.5% in the month of June 2017. Nearly all of that gain, however, was due to a jump (131%) in new orders for civilian aircraft. That meant demand for transportation equipment, a highly volatile segment, rose 19% in the month. Excluding all that, durable goods were up just 0.2% month-over-month. Sentiment indicators like [...]
I suspect President Trump has been told that markets don’t like radical changes. If there is one thing that any elected official is afraid of, it’s the internet flooded with reports of grave financial instability. We need only go back a year to find otherwise confident authorities suddenly reassessing their whole outlook. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump was very [...]
The TIC data for May was inconsistent. It has been that way for several months, and importantly describes what I think is the operative “dollar” condition. Though the data is several months old already, we can tell by certain real-time prices and indications that the difference between 2016 and 2017 is very clear in some parts, and none in others. [...]
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