Since December 2015, China’s powerful politburo has met nine times to discuss the economy. The Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee is a group of 25 top officials who control pretty much everything. The politburo’s smaller Standing Committee is the very top echelon of the Communist Party. Members of the politburo are given top jobs in the [...]
If you think President Trump is upset with Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, you should see what’s going on in India. Central bankers had been every government’s close friend for years; a decade even. The relationships were beyond chummy, particularly as many governments celebrated their central bank heroes for heroically heroic actions saving the world from something like a repeat [...]
US imports rose sharply (seasonally-adjusted) in September 2018 over August. Both with and without petroleum, the year-over-year gains (unadjusted) were about 9%. September, however, will be the last month of favorable comparisons. Over the next few months last year’s artificial hurricane related surge will move into the base for comparisons. Exports were up far more modestly, still down from the [...]
On December 5, 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that in the month of November 2014 nonfarm private payrolls had surged by +321k. Typically bureaucratic, the introduction to the report was unusually blunt. “Job gains were widespread.” The text didn’t come right out and say it so the media did it all for them. TD Ameritrade’s Chief Strategist [...]
Language is often said to be a living thing. Common everyday usage can and does introduce new words and changes the meaning of existing ones. But this is a gradual evolution, and rarely does the process leap ahead into more drastic alterations. Central bankers, however, are challenging such preconceptions. They write words that often have specific meanings in everyday custom [...]
Why aren’t more people talking about this? It’s a huge development and nary a peep anywhere. The mainstream media is filled with baited expectations for 3% wage growth on Payroll Friday. All eyes are on the labor market, which is a lagging indication, instead of on the oil market, which is forward looking. As of this writing, the futures curve [...]
Upon the precipice of the Great “Recession”, US workers were cushioned to some extent by what economists call sticky wages. Before the Great Depression, as well as during it, companies would attempt to deal with looming economic contraction by cutting pay rates before workers. Nowadays, the intent is reversed; businesses will try to keep core workers by keeping pay rates [...]
Trade war stuff didn’t really hit the tape until several months into 2018. There were some noises about it back in January, but there was also a prominent liquidation in global markets in the same month. If the world’s economy hit a wall in that particular month, which is the more likely candidate for blame? We see it register in [...]
Overseas turmoil continues in October. The Chinese government released its Purchasing Managers Indices (PMI) for both manufacturing and services. Each one came in at a multi-month low. The National Bureau of Statistics calculated that the manufacturing version was just 50.2 this month, the lowest level since July 2016. The Non-manufacturing PMI fell sharply to 53.9 from 54.9 in September. October’s [...]
On February 12, 1999, the Bank of Japan announced that it was going full zero. Japan’s central bank would from that day forward push the overnight uncollateralized lending (interbank) rate to the zero lower bound. Further, it pledged to keep it there until Japan’s economy recovered. The economic slump in the nineties had been by 1999 almost a decade in [...]
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