Writing earlier this year on the topic of the Fed’s future balance sheet reductions, Ben Bernanke had occasion to recount his experience from 2013. It was a stressful time for the Fed after they panicked into QE3 (and then QE4) and then almost panicked right out of it. The then-Fed Chairman stressed from his experience the importance of communications as [...]
JOLTS figures for the month of April 2017, released today, highlight what is in the end likely to be a more positive outcome for them. It has very little to do with the economy itself, as what we are witnessing is the culmination of extreme positions that have been made and estimated going all the way back to 2014. At [...]
If I was forced to use only one word to describe most that is wrong in the world today it would be “economists.” The global economy is stuck in a depression that has already lasted ten years. Because of it, the world’s social and political order has frayed around the edges and threatens to do much more than that (in [...]
In the framework of government policy, there is enormous interest in relating the specific condition of any economy to how the government must respond to it. This, of course, presupposes that this is the case, that there must be some impartial body or official standing between what would otherwise be free market excesses. The entire literature devoted to answering the [...]
I have never understood the infatuation with randomness. When I was first introduced to statistics at a very young age, I had a hard time at first trying to comprehend the paradigm in my own intuitive fashion. It seemed like something was off about it, where random chance was the cornerstone of a philosophy trying to describe and predict a [...]
When looking at the bond market or eurodollar futures, both tugged by JPY, I don’t think it was just the payroll report that pushed new levels of anti-reflation today. Instead, there is too much that is consistent with a weak payroll report, and by that a mean a string of them. Yesterday, for example, automakers released their sales estimates for [...]
I have been writing for many years that they really don’t know what they are doing. I only wish it was that simple. There has been developing another layer or dimension to that condition, a second derivative of stupid, whereby when faced with this now well-established fact the same people, experts and authorities all, they have no frame of reference [...]
The irony of the unemployment rate for the Federal Reserve is that the lower it gets now the bigger the problem it is for officials. It has been up to this year their sole source of economic comfort. Throughout 2015, the Establishment Survey improperly contributed much the same sympathy, but even it no longer resides on the plus side of [...]
Both US manufacturing PMI’s underwhelmed just as those from China did. The IHS Markit Index was lower than the flash reading and the lowest level since last September. For May 2017, it registered 52.7, down from 52.8 in April and a high of 55.0 in January. Just by description alone you can appreciate exactly what pattern that fits. The ISM [...]
China’s PMI’s were uniformly disappointing with respect to what Moody’s was on about last week. Chinese authorities expended great effort and resources to get the economy moving forward again after several years of “dollar”-driven deceleration. There was a massive “stimulus” spending program where State-owned FAI expenditures of about 2% of GDP were elicited to make up for Private FAI that [...]
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