Fears over machines aren’t anything new. The Terminator franchise got started in the eighties and was hardly original back then. In gross economic terms, it may seem like the robot invasion is a 21st century phenomenon. It isn’t. One need only go back to Alberta of all places and learn about the Canadian Clifford Hugh Douglas. Douglas preached something called [...]
The coronavirus began during December, but in its early stages no one knew a thing about it. It wasn’t until January 1 that health authorities in China closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after initially determining some wild animals sold there might have been the source of a pneumonia-like outbreak. On January 5, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a [...]
As you might imagine, inflation was the hot topic of conversation during the December 2014 FOMC meeting. Having opened up the transcripts for that year to the public last month, we are once more treated to the background behind this theater of the absurd. The final few months of 2014 were when everything came together. For these central bankers, it [...]
The world has a big dollar problem on its hands. That’s not a statement which will surprise any of you who have been readers here for any length of time. Nor would it amaze you if I also said the world has a massive shadow dollar shortage. The kind of dollars more attuned to bank footnotes than any of the [...]
Everyone who lived through the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) remembers the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, if not the name itself. The law had authorized TARP (among other things). It was passed during the messiest part of the panic, being signed into law on October 3, 2008. You can always tell what is not going to happen by whatever [...]
We knew German Industrial Production for December 2019 was going to be ugly given what deStatis had reported for factory orders yesterday. In all likelihood, Germany’s industrial economy ended last year sinking and maybe too quickly. What was actually reported, however, exceeded every pessimistic guess and expectation – by a lot. IP absolutely plummeted in the final month of 2019. [...]
President Trump mentioned the unemployment rate seven times during his third State of the Union address delivered on Tuesday. It was obvious why he did (though I had expected twice that number). His reelection largely stands on where enough people believe the economy stands. He was, after all, elected four years ago to fix what had been a very real [...]
I wrote a few months ago that Germany’s factories have been the perfect example of the eurodollar squeeze. The disinflationary tendency that even central bankers can’t ignore once it shows up in the global economy as obvious headwinds. What made and still makes German industry noteworthy is the way it has unfolded and continues to unfold. The downtrend just won’t [...]
On January 14, FRBNY announced that it would continue offering its short-term liquidity operations for another month, until at least February 13. In setting the scene in order to slowly wean primary dealers from its non-repo repo program, the New York branch also declared that at its term repo window the cap would be reduced from $35 billion to $30 [...]
After a stunningly bad October and November, the Census Bureau reports US imports rebounded in December 2019 on a seasonally-adjusted basis. Having fallen below $200 billion for the first time since October 2017, total imports of goods rose to $205.8 billion in the final month of last year. However, most of that increase, two-thirds of it, was due to “industrial [...]
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