I have never understood the infatuation with randomness. When I was first introduced to statistics at a very young age, I had a hard time at first trying to comprehend the paradigm in my own intuitive fashion. It seemed like something was off about it, where random chance was the cornerstone of a philosophy trying to describe and predict a [...]
When looking at the bond market or eurodollar futures, both tugged by JPY, I don’t think it was just the payroll report that pushed new levels of anti-reflation today. Instead, there is too much that is consistent with a weak payroll report, and by that a mean a string of them. Yesterday, for example, automakers released their sales estimates for [...]
I have been writing for many years that they really don’t know what they are doing. I only wish it was that simple. There has been developing another layer or dimension to that condition, a second derivative of stupid, whereby when faced with this now well-established fact the same people, experts and authorities all, they have no frame of reference [...]
The irony of the unemployment rate for the Federal Reserve is that the lower it gets now the bigger the problem it is for officials. It has been up to this year their sole source of economic comfort. Throughout 2015, the Establishment Survey improperly contributed much the same sympathy, but even it no longer resides on the plus side of [...]
Both US manufacturing PMI’s underwhelmed just as those from China did. The IHS Markit Index was lower than the flash reading and the lowest level since last September. For May 2017, it registered 52.7, down from 52.8 in April and a high of 55.0 in January. Just by description alone you can appreciate exactly what pattern that fits. The ISM [...]
China’s PMI’s were uniformly disappointing with respect to what Moody’s was on about last week. Chinese authorities expended great effort and resources to get the economy moving forward again after several years of “dollar”-driven deceleration. There was a massive “stimulus” spending program where State-owned FAI expenditures of about 2% of GDP were elicited to make up for Private FAI that [...]
MF Global failed on a trade that would have made it enormously profitable. AIG’s portfolios of “toxic waste” ended up making money – for the Federal Reserve. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were ended like the others by liquidity, not losses. SemGroup was another firm that went into bankruptcy during that period, but one that practically no one has heard [...]
Many surveys of especially manufacturer sentiment were for most of the past few years highly volatile in their month-to-month changes. It wasn’t at all unusual for the Chicago Business Barometer, for example, to be up big one month and then down just as much if not more the next. What was important was not those individual swings but that these [...]
In the earliest days of the Federal Reserve, it was common practice for the various branch administrations to hold direct communications not just with the banks in those respective districts but also individual firms. The reasoning was sound enough, given that in the 1910’s and 1920’s there weren’t yet the kind of economic statistics that today litter the media landscape. [...]
The Federal Reserve defines price stability in terms of consumer prices rather than a stable currency. Up until 2012, any inflation target was implicit in monetary policy behavior rather than explicitly stated as an incorporated aspect. Everyone knew, of course, that the Fed had throughout the 1990’s sought a stable regime of around 2% growth in the PCE Deflator. Furthermore, [...]
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