It’s always cute when most commentary is left hanging with “better than expected.” The straight fact is that the US CPI was lower for the second consecutive month, but since it wasn’t as low as some “analysts” were anticipating, that counts, apparently, as “hot” and in some places “blistering” inflation. There’s no other way to characterize deceleration as scorching other [...]
Retail Sales in January 2018 rose by a little over 5% year-over-year. That followed sharp downward revisions to December, where in the biggest retail month of any calendar sales are now thought to have gained just 3.7%. Both of those rates are concerning, particularly the latter, given that almost all the gain was registered during September and October – the [...]
The Fed in its Beige Book as well as in the speeches of several of its officials has referenced a labor shortage for years now. On the one hand, that is understandable given the trajectory of the unemployment rate. All the way back in 2013, during the so-called taper tantrum, it was the rapid drop in that rate which triggered [...]
You find lots of tortured arguments about the state of the economy, largely because the premise starts with the boom and then seeks to find it. If it isn’t currently visible in the data, there is unusual and unearned confidence that the data will have to change in the near future (rather than the past three times we’ve been through [...]
One less mainstream piece of this inflation hysteria boom is the velocity of money. In case you haven’t yet heard, monetary velocity is rising. From that we are supposed to infer all the usual – wages, inflation, higher rates, and utter destruction in bonds if not the whole Western economic structure. The first part is technically true. Money velocity increased [...]
Economic Reports Economic Growth & Income Personal income for December was better than expected at up 0.4% on the month and 4.11% year over year. Wages and salaries were up 0.5%. Unfortunately, that rate of rise is not even up to the lower end of the range we've seen in past expansions when 5% income growth was a precursor to [...]
It’s always been easy to lose perspective. In the modern social media age, maybe it has become even easier. Conventional wisdom rarely seems to get challenged anymore, particularly given the assignment of “what everybody knows.” Big Data is, for example, predicated on a very good theory, the wisdom of crowds. It hasn’t yet lived up to its expectations because as [...]
No matter where one looks, there is extreme positioning in all the key markets. Each one is pulled further and further toward “reflation”, too, or in the case of the euro this “falling dollar” consistent with that idea. The world is betting big on it finally coming true, the “globally synchronized growth” to this point of pure myth. If there [...]
China’s shock “devaluation” was not the only one in 2015. It was the currency disruption that most people remember, even if years later they’re not sure exactly why. Paying attention to CNY makes sense, requiring no further explanation for why it might be given focus even from the otherwise unaware. In December 2015, while global liquidity conditions further deteriorated the [...]
The conventional interpretation of “reflation” in the second half of 2016 was that it was simply the opening act, the first step in the long-awaiting global recovery. That is what reflation technically means as distinct from recovery; something falls off, and to get back on track first there has to be acceleration to make up that lost difference. There was, [...]
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