It’s impossible to tell what drives the short run in anything, so anything we describe and attempt to ascribe moves to comes with a grain of salt. That said, there are clearly some things missing here. I’m not talking about big stuff like overrating the Fed’s predictive abilities and its resolve, ridiculous stock valuations, or anything of the like. Stocks [...]
In February 2013, the Chinese Golden Week fell late in the calendar. The year before, 2012, New Year was January 23rd, meaning that the entire Spring festival holiday was taken with the month of January. The following year, China’s New Year was placed on February 10, with the Golden Week taking up the entire middle month of February. For economic [...]
When the Federal Reserve last month updated its estimates for consumer credit, we thought it was concerning if consistent with the labor market that revolving credit jumped by $11.2 billion in November 2017. The increase continued a pattern of greater regular usage of largely credit cards in lieu of growing incomes which have pretty much stagnated for several years. Undo [...]
For me, the defining characteristic of the late nineties wasn’t the dot-coms. Most people were exposed to the NASDAQ because, frankly, at the time there was no getting away from it. It had seeped into everything, transforming from a financial niche bleeding eventually into the entire worldwide culture. We all remember the grocery clerks who became day traders. Behind all [...]
Jerome “Jay” Powell was added to the Federal Reserve Board in May 2012. Quite an auspicious time to be thrown into things, Powell had avoided the “unexpected” liquidity crisis of 2011 but he did have to deal with its aftermath. By September of 2012, the Federal Reserve was once again debating yet more QE; a third round. Powell was among [...]
US imports rocketed higher once again in December, according to just-released estimates from the Census Bureau. Since August 2017, the US economy has been adding foreign goods at an impressive pace. Year-over-year (SA), imports are up just 10.4% (only 9% unadjusted) but 9.3% was in just those last four months. For most of 2017, imports were flat and even lower. [...]
The current state of geological science cannot predict an earthquake. There is hope, however, that warnings might be realistically developed so that populations in danger of the “big one” can be given some sort of reasonable information about probabilities. In studying the past few devastating quakes, such as the 2011 9.0 that hit Japan twice (once in the shaking, then [...]
When Apple first came out with the iPhone in 2007, it was truly a revolutionary product. Even for those of us who hadn’t been impressed with Apple’s computers had to tip our caps to Steve Jobs (and team) for what they had pulled off. He knew it, of course, which is why earlier that year Apple Computer had dropped the [...]
Brazilian stocks closed out January on an impressive run. Like stock markets all over the rest of the emerging market economies, Brazil’s has been on fire. The Sao Paolo Bovespa stock index had stumbled a bit in the middle of December, coinciding with a drop in the real against the dollar in that fit of global illiquidity, but between December [...]
What happened to the recovery? It’s a complex question with a surprisingly simple answer. The density of the topic, particularly entangled as it was in close proximity to the calamity of the Great “Recession”, clouded the diagnosis. If you ask ten different academic economists you might get ten different answers, though I suspect seven or eight of them would be [...]
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