The FOMC held a meeting and that can only mean dots. These are the individual policymaker’s views on where the federal funds target range might end up down the road. The latest update for the June 2021 central bank conclave shows several more voting members projecting the first rate hikes to begin toward the end of next year, a supposedly [...]
Same stuff, different month. We can basically reprint both what was described yesterday about supply curves not keeping up with exaggerated demand as well as the past two months of commentary on Retail Sales plus Industrial Production each for the US. Quite on the nose, US demand for goods, anyway, is eroding if still artificially very high. Producers, on the [...]
Yesterday, lumber. Today, copper. The “doctor” has been in reverse for better than two months now, with trading in the current session pounding the commodity to a new multi-month low. Down almost $0.19 for the day, an unusual and eye-opening loss, this brings the cumulative decline to 9.2% since the peak way back on May 11.Is this just another modest [...]
While capital “E” economics can never seem to get out of its own, infatuated with statistics and regressions instead, small “e” economics is proven time and again. Simple supply and demand curves aren’t a realistic simulation of potential conditions, yet they are far more helpful than DSGE models even if highly stylized representations. Take, for example, lumber prices. Anyone remotely [...]
I told you last week that there were strange things going on in the labor market but I had no idea how much of an understatement that really was. Much of last week's economic focus was on the inflation report but I think the JOLTS report may turn out to be more significant. Inflation was indeed pretty hot year over [...]
It isn’t all base effects, or even all that much of them. Though these were higher in May 2021 than they had been in April, US consumer prices have accelerated regardless. According to the BLS and its latest CPI estimates, the net change in its headline index last month from last May was an excitable 4.99% (unadjusted). That’s the highest [...]
Inflation is more than just any old touchy subject in an age overflowing with crude, visceral debates up and down the spectrum reaching into every corner of life. It is about life itself, and not just quality. When the prices of the goods (or services) you absolutely depend upon go up, your entire world becomes that much more difficult. For [...]
One of the more compelling aspects of the last LABOR SHORTAGE!!!!, in an outright contradictory way, was how it was made up of entirely anecdotes. Lacking data, especially wage data, the narrative was instead kept up and alive by the media hyping every small creative innovation companies were using if only to avoid having to actually pay their workers and [...]
It wasn’t all that long ago when the media began to fill itself up with one story after another about how huge looming inflationary pressures were causing the entire “market” to rethink its lengthy and determined anti-reflationary stance. Back in March, for instance, S&P had joined this chorus by zeroing in on eurodollar futures, of all instruments, and coming back [...]
April 2021’s payroll estimate (CES) was the “bad” one; at a revised +278,000 it was “supposed” to have been significantly better than the “good” one for March (+785,000, revised). Near three hundred thousand in any month before 2020 would’ve been celebrated as a near miracle (that’s just how bad the labor market has been for a long time). What made [...]
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