Retail sales rebounded 0.8% in October 2018 from September 2018, but it’s the downward revisions to the prior months that are cause for attention. The estimates for particularly September were moved sharply lower. Total retail sales two months ago had been figured last month at $485.8 billion (unadjusted) originally, but are now believed to have been just $483.0 billion. The [...]
We often forget, the middle 2000’s was not uniquely a housing bubble. It commanded our attention because that’s what ended up affecting so many Americans personally; whether foreclosures or just the negative “wealth effect” of declining real estate values. This was also pretty easy to understand, an asset bubble though complicated in its full manifestations intuitive as a result. There [...]
There was nothing really shocking about China’s monthly economic statistics for October 2018. The Big 3, Industrial Production, Retail Sales, and Fixed Asset Investment, all continue along in the same way. The Chinese economy is not crashing, it may be slowing, but most of all there isn’t any more upside. It’s the last one that is important. As such, Communist [...]
It was like a scene out of the seventies. Americans lined in their cars all over the Southeast hoping that their local filling station would have gasoline. There were documented reports of shortages as far away as the Dakotas. This wasn’t typical behavior, fortunately, so it couldn’t have been too much like the oil embargo era. Instead, in early September [...]
It’s one of those “nothing to see here” moments for Economists trying not to appreciate what's really going on in China therefore the global economy. The slump in China’s automotive sector dragged on through October, with year-over-year sales down for the fourth straight month. Auto sales last month were off 12% from a year earlier to 2.38 million, the government-backed [...]
As we watch Jay Powell’s case dissipate on NYMEX WTI right before our very eyes, we can count on his ideology to try to make it for him in the absence of actual data. Economists will not budge no matter how much stacks against them; nor how many times we have to repeat this very exercise. This will be the [...]
At the end of June, the crude curve really got out of hand. WTI futures had returned to backwardation many months before, and then the eurodollar/collateral explosion May 29 sapped some crude strength. Over the following month, curve backwardation would become extreme as the benchmark price seemed ready to skyrocket. After getting up near $80 a barrel, the price reversed. [...]
The news was one of those instances when you could see they were trying a little too hard. It didn’t make any sense, not anyway in the context to which it was delivered. On September 21, unnamed German officials were supposedly championing a megamerger in the banking sector. The country’s two largest financial institutions might be brought together to save [...]
It was a forgettable moment. The Federal Reserve’s Chairman at the time, Janet Yellen, was asked about a key economic statistic and she just couldn’t come up with it. In September 2016, Yellen was on Capitol Hill to testify as she usually did about how things were surely getting better. Rep. Frank Guinta wanted to know what that might mean [...]
It’s always a fine line for authorities. There are times when avoiding intervention is more effective than intervention. That’s particularly true when the efficacy of whatever proposed policy is in doubt. If you don’t know for sure that it will work, maybe don’t do it. There are often grave risks associated with plunging forward recklessly. In other words, officials can [...]
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