For about the last two weeks, I have been writing about the contours of what I have perceived as a RMB liquidity operation that seems to be far more than the usual management of day-to-day confluences. Since the last week in October, RMB liquidity both onshore and offshore has been more and more plentiful but only in the shortest overnight [...]
The LMCI was positive in October for the third time in the past five months. Revisions are to be expected in any statistic, but more so with the Fed’s factor model by its construction where it has to predict certain parts of its nineteen inputs. Not all those statistics are readily available when it is published and many undergo benchmark [...]
As if anyone needed any proof as to why economics needs to be so thoroughly debunked, it was on display again today. I am talking about Rome over Carthage defeat, where the textbooks of Economics (capital “E”) should be so salted and devastated in the same manner in which the Romans banished the Carthaginians forever to nothing but history. Economics [...]
Popular convention purports that the Fed established its independence in 1951 when it told the Truman administration it would no longer fix a ceiling on government bond rates. The Treasury Department had to finance the Korean War and the administration expected all its agencies to fall in line. With the debacle of the Great Depression, and then the second error [...]
When life gives you lemons you intend to make lemonade, but in days long gone they often had to make due only with what was on hand. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were by pure accident, though I doubt many (or any) were as plain unsanitary as Hennig Brand’s discovery. He had been looking to find gold in urine, [...]
Throughout the 1990’s, calculated productivity in the US skyrocketed in what was taken then as a sign of monetary and economic genius, the “maestro” as it was. By the incomplete measures we have, that certainly seemed to be a plausible case. Starting in 1997, the BLS’s first measure for economic productivity, output per hour, surged. The consequence of that productivity [...]
The payroll report disappointed again, especially since October has in the past marked the end of seasonal weakness. Last year the headline for the Establishment Survey followed the usual summer doldrums: July +277k, Aug +150k, Sept +149k, and October 2015 +295k. This year, the sequence has been (with revisions): July +252k, Aug +176k, Sept +191k, and October 2016 +161k. To [...]
The persistent economic theme of 2014 was that it was better than 2013 or 2012. Therefore, it was assumed, that meant everything had been set right and the temporary disturbances of those prior years were put to the past. It was a fundamental error not just of conflating relative versus actual, but completely ignoring how it was something we had [...]
If we were to accurately describe the economy right now, it would be weak – but not getting weaker. I believe that is the product of the “dollar”, or lack of further “dollar” intrusion. Combined with the usual seasonal changes earlier in the year, the nervous calm of the past almost eight months has had a limited but nonetheless soothing [...]
In the seventeenth episode of the second season of the Comedy Central cartoon South Park, the show introduces one of its longest lasting memes that has survived despite the first airing being nearly twenty years ago, and all the vulgarity and seemingly gratuitous violence in between. Titled Gnomes, we find one of the main character’s underpants (seriously) being stolen by [...]
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