Retail sales had a good month of November, or at least what counts as decent over the last five and a half years. Total retail sales (unadjusted) rose 6.35% last month, up from 4.9% (revised higher) in October. It was the highest rate of growth since the 29-day month of February 2016. For retailers, what matters is that it comes [...]
When we look back at the period known as the Great Inflation there is a tendency, I believe, to truncate the episode only to the most well-known parts. What many people remember are things like gas lines, where oil problems and embargoes left Americans at several points in the seventies too often stuck for trying fill up their autos (or [...]
Of the few economists honest about the economy, there has been a struggle to come up with an explanation for persisting economic struggles. That has led to a plethora of labels applied to the last decade. Brad Delong, for example, once called it the Lesser Depression. Larry Summers has revived Alan Hansen’s Secular Stagnation. I prefer Eurodollar Stagnation to that [...]
There was a lot of talk about the supposed oil supply glut around early 2015, for good reasons that only partially related to the supply of oil. That wasn’t the only industry impacted by what was really going on, meaning the falling demand side to the world economy. Shipping companies have faced a supply glut of their own, but one [...]
Ronald Coase was one of the few economists who was easy to admire. There are and have been a few out there, and it was Coase by and large leading the critique of the increasingly detached state of economics (really Economics). In his 1991 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he was as usual blunt in his admonishments, saying, “I have made [...]
The biggest proponents of the BLS data have been FOMC policymakers. Right from the taper tantrum of 2013, the unemployment rate has given them, and the Economists who depend on their views for crafting their own, an almost definitive set of parameters for interpreting all other economic statistics. Everything is immediately filtered through the lens of the unemployment rate and [...]
As part of its effort to stress its own self-importance, the Federal Reserve conducts a survey of the Primary Dealer members through its New York branch. A written questionnaire is sent out to each bank in advance of every monetary policy meeting. The purpose is for monetary policymakers to make sure that there aren’t any big surprises, that the market, [...]
It's been a week of quite righteous focus on collateral. The 4-week bill equivalent yield closes it at just 114 bps, with only three days left before the RRP "floor" is moved up by the FOMC to 125 bps. That's too much premium in price, though we know why given what FRBNY reported for repo fails last week. With all [...]
The timing just never seems to fall in our favor. If we had had this conversation ten years ago as would have been appropriate, then this evolution might have fell perfectly in our collective laps. Just as the global financial system, really the international, interbank monetary system of the eurodollar, was crashing all around us, the genesis block of the [...]
As weird as it may seem at first, the primary economic problem right now is that the global economy looks like it is growing again. There is no doubt that it continues on an upturn, but the mere fact that whatever economic statistic has a positive sign in front of it ends up being classified as some variant of strong. [...]
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