To be an interested observer of things in the summer of 2013 was to be awash in the awareness of so many contradictions packed into one little piece of history. Forward guidance, for one, recognized the effects of markets. If QE was really effective, interest rates would rise not fall in anticipation of those positive effects. This was, actually, the [...]
Imagine yourself as a rural Chinese farmer. Even the term “farmer” makes it sound better than it really is. This is a life out of the 19th century, subsistence at best the daily struggle just to survive. Flourishing is a dream. Only, you can see just on the other side of the hill the bright reflective lights of one of [...]
This is perhaps the perfect day to review what’s going on in Hong Kong (thanks J. Fraser). I’ll be in Vancouver over the weekend to talk about curves, so why not preface it with a little HKD update. With everyone focused elsewhere, the story of 2017, in my view, wasn’t so big in 2018. For reasons that will further disturb [...]
Today was supposed to see the release of the Census Bureau’s retail trade report, a key data set pertaining to the (alarming) state of American consumers, therefore workers by extension (income). With the federal government in partial shutdown, those numbers will be delayed until further notice. In their place we will have to manage with something like the Federal Reserves’ [...]
Goods require money to finance both their production as well as their movements. They need oil and energy for the same reasons. If oil and money markets were drastically awful for a few months before December, and then purely chaotic during December, Mario Draghi of all people should’ve been paying attention. China put up some bad trade numbers for last [...]
And we come full circle back again. It’s not what they say, it’s what they do. Kansas City Fed CEO Esther George was at least consistent, unlike all the other voting FOMC members. Throughout 2015 and 2016, the rest of them would say the economy was strong but then vote the other way, no “rate hike.” December 2015 was the [...]
We are starting to get a better sense of what happened to turn everything so drastically in December. Not that we hadn’t suspected while it was all taking place, but more and more in January the economic data for the last couple months of 2018 backs up the market action. These were no speculators looking to break Jay Powell, probing [...]
In the chaotic days of the early “recovery”, those opposed to the Federal Reserve’s response largely fell into the wrong camp. The central bank had done too much, they claimed. Never mind how the first global panic in four generations had developed and then crushed the global economy, such deflation was over to be taken apart by rapid inflation if [...]
As I wrote yesterday, “In the West, consumer prices overall are pushed around by oil. In the East, by food.” In neither case is inflation buoyed by “money printing.” Central banks both West and East are doing things, of course, but none of them amount to increasing the effective supply of money. Failure of inflation, more so economy, the predictable [...]
The US federal government is shut down and certain economic data accounts are being left to go without scheduled updates, things like US trade provided by the Census Bureau. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more watched series aren’t among the forgotten, however. The monthly payroll report would be compiled and released even during a nuclear attack. Yes, it really is [...]
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