At the end of August, the US Energy Information Administration reported that it had been overstating domestic demand for oil and energy products to a considerable degree. Using imprecise and lagging data, the calculations for the amount of product being exported overseas was understated by an average of 16%. That meant more output was being used elsewhere, thus less product [...]
The US is not alone in its corporate profit slump. In China, profits at State-Owned Enterprises fell a further 6.5% year-over-year in the January to July period. Estimated to have been RMB 1.31 trillion (about $195 billion), SOE profits are being dragged down by those firms under control of the central government. Locally-administered SOE’s showed net income declining by only [...]
The yield on the 10-year US Treasury closed at around 1.68% today, but judging by the haughty commentary surrounding global bond markets you would be forgiven if you thought it was 2.68%. Since the low in July around 1.37%, that +30 bps apparently seems like it to many people. Going back to the end of QE2, the idea that rates [...]
Chinese oil imports surged again in August to the equivalent of 7.77 million barrels per day (mbpd). That was significantly more than July’s pace of 7.35 mbpd, and up an astounding 1.5 mbpd from August 2015. It was the highest rate of oil imports since April. The demand for commodities hasn’t been limited to just crude oil, as coal imports [...]
In 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote in his paper defining the “uncertainty principle” that, “the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.” It has also been called the “principle of indeterminacy” which simply means that you can only pick one variable. By doing so, you lose any chance for [...]
The worst month for the wholesale level of the supply chain during the Great Recession was May 2009, just at the tail end of the heaviest part. The amount of sales as well as the calculated decline has moved around somewhat over the years as revisions have rewritten the amplitudes and the ultimate depth of that event, but May 2009 [...]
It has to be a sign of the times as well as human nature where we are compelled to either forget the (recent) past or to convince ourselves that we have moved far enough beyond the mistakes of them. There were two stories reported today that are seemingly unrelated except by how they contradict each other in principle. The first, [...]
In 2015 the combination of the “weaker” euro against the dollar as well as the fact that monetary “stimulus” in Europe accomplished even less than that here meant that for the first time since 1961 France was not Germany’s largest trading partner. Exports to the United States finally surpassed those to its close European neighbor. When the statistics showing the [...]
In all honesty, I could start almost any piece I write with the phrase “economists are stumped.” It has become something of a baseline where there is some element or condition of the global economy that doesn’t make sense to them. The latest update in JOLTS for July continues to be faithful to the seeming contradiction. By view of the [...]
Speculators are a curious bunch, not in what they do or how they do it but more so in how and really when they attain notice. When the SEC in July 2008 banned naked short selling of GSE and primary dealer stocks, they were the obvious enemy creating “unnecessary” trouble that was amplifying what was supposed to be in the [...]
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