Just over a week ago, the world (at least in chemistry) celebrated Mole Day. Rather than acknowledge the small underground mammal that immediately springs to mind, Mole Day is in honor of Amadeo Avogadro, the Count of Quaregna and Cerreto, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and contributed one of the major international base units in [...]
Personal Income and Spending continue to suggest only further weakness. While there is a whole lot of caution necessary when analyzing this data due to its susceptibility to large revisions, there is still only further deceleration on both sides of the consumer. Nominal Disposable Personal Income (DPI) was up just 3.4% year-over-year in September 2016, below the 3.8% average of [...]
For many, it was just too good. In early 2013, gold prices were slammed – twice. Just after QE3 was announced, gold had moved back up to almost $1,800 per ounce as it “should” have, reflecting all that future “money printing.” Rather than keep going, however, gold started to drop and then drop some more so that by the time [...]
Where do we go from here? If the monetary system is broken, how do we fix it so that the global economy can be mercifully released from the “dollar’s” gripping vise? The short answer is that it is too complicated to contemplate in this setting. A better answer is that I don’t know because there is a great deal that [...]
The ultimate lesson for learning not to rely on one quarter of GDP growth was actually two quarters. In the middle of 2014, GDP posted back-to-back gains that at the time seemed nothing less than fantastic. Even with residual seasonality revisions and new benchmarks, those two quarters remain prominent landmarks in an otherwise bleak landscape. And that is the whole [...]
Last year, the usual rebound in GDP was flipped. Q1’s are, or were before “residual seasonality”, the low mark followed by some surge at some point. In 2015, it was Q2 that originally jumped, hitting almost 4% in the original estimates. What followed in Q3 was frustration, as GDP was first figured to be only 1.5%. It was disappointing but [...]
Durable goods continue to show that there is no difference between the economy of 2015 and the one being described by these numbers in 2016. To the “transitory” narrative, it is the death blow, which is why so many central banks and central bankers are busy exploring other options (while as quietly as they can writing down the future economy). [...]
There is a growing body of public work that suggests Federal Reserve officials are prepared now for a very different sort of normalization than what had been envisioned up until this year. That comes, as noted earlier, with the realization that the economy is not just in rough shape but likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future. The [...]
It has been my contention for some long while that one of the biggest parts of this “rising dollar”, that is, again, nothing more than a euphemism for the various ways in which there is a “dollar” shortage, is balance sheet math. The problem in as simple terms as perhaps possible is that positions were taken, balance sheets constructed, and [...]
It is a long road to recovery, an actual one, if we are to be left to the pace of economists struggling to make sense of the analog world. They are truly digital creatures, who would look at information and make no judgment until the models tell them what to think. You or I would find troubling data and seek [...]
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