As I have written many, many times, the “unexpected” events of January and February were a dramatic wake-up call for central banks. Last August’s global liquidation they could at least try to ignore because it could possibly fit within the paradigm of “transitory”, a one-off aberration that was some mysterious Chinese viral contagion and thus of not any great, lingering [...]
Today’s durable goods report was uniformly ugly, if not borderline atrocious. The view from especially capital goods, the vital investment that the US economy sorely needs to snap out of its slump, is that spring is definitely over. Contraction accelerated in almost every corner, with durable goods shipments (ex transportation), for example, falling by almost 4% year-over-year, the worst month [...]
The contradictory nature of the real estate market continues to be exhibited in resales as well as new construction. Though sales of new homes jumped, resales fell. Since last June, the level of contracts for the sale of existing homes has been stuck around 5.4 million SAAR. That was about the same rate of activity as reached at the height [...]
It wasn’t the introduction of statistics that led to the dire state of “science”, rather it was the jettison of common sense in favor of, and the total deference to, statistics. This was not a single event or a clean break, of course, as it happened slowly over decades. But in the 21st century what is often talked about and [...]
Going back to Japan for a third time today (it is more than deserved), at least in the setup, the Financial Times on August 1 astutely picked up what the rest of the mainstream media missed about the last BoJ policy moves. They correctly judged the “dollar” intentions, but also that it wasn’t nearly enough, as I wrote earlier. However, nobody [...]
Starting June 8, oil prices began falling again, reversing their more optimistic trend that had lingered since February 11 long after the usual correlation to CNY was broken. In fact, by the time WTI had peaked, CNY was already being meddled with again in clear PBOC interference. Despite being backward to what was 2015’s relationship of death, by July the [...]
On March 9, 2016, front month trading for Japanese government bond (JGB) futures was halted at 12:32 pm Tokyo time. Selling had become intense, tripping the Osaka Exchange’s dynamic circuit breaker. The total length of the halt was just 30 seconds, but fingers were already being pointed in the direction of the BoJ. More than four months later, on July [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard If you want to understand the US economy based on one economic report, you could do a lot worse than the report on productivity released last week. This was the third quarter in a row that showed a decline in US productivity. That is, output was up (GDP was positive) but not as much as the amount [...]
The simple fact of the matter is that 2012 wasn’t supposed to happen. By every orthodox prediction and theory about the set of tools deployed after the Great Recession (after it, the first clue) there was no reason to suspect anything but the usual cyclical occurrences. Sure, the recovery would be weak because the recession large, but retrenchment was never [...]
John Williams: Finally, monetary policy frameworks should be critically reevaluated to identify potential improvements in the context of a low r-star. Although targeting a low inflation rate generally has been successful at taming inflation in the past, it is not as well-suited for a low r-star era. There is simply not enough room for central banks to cut interest rates [...]
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