The Federal Reserve reported yesterday that revolving consumer credit in the US rose by a seasonally adjusted $10 billion in the month of July 2019. That was the largest single monthly increase since November 2017. Given how the latter month was related to “residual seasonality”, meaning Americans spending perhaps more than they wanted for the Christmas holiday, and the middle [...]
The last time was bad, no getting around it. From the end of 2014 until the first months of 2016, the Chinese economy was in a perilous state. Dramatic weakness had emerged which had seemed impossible to reconcile with conventions about the country. Committed to growth over everything, and I mean everything, China was the one country the world thought [...]
Right now, everything comes down to the labor market. Does the US economy hang on despite stubborn and evidently non-transitory overseas turmoil cross currents? Or do American consumers rightly confident of the economic situation re-assert themselves via their wallets and deliriously spend the economy back on track? You better believe Fed Chairman Jay Powell will be watching the data very [...]
For every action there is a reaction. Not only is that Sir Isaac Newton’s third law, it’s also a statement about human nature. Unlike physics where causes and effects are near simultaneous, there is a time component to how we interact. In official capacities, even more so. Bureaucratic inertia means a lot more than just resistance to change, it also [...]
Give stimulus a chance, that’s the theme being set up for this week. After relentless buying across global bond markets distorting curves, upsetting politicians and the public alike, central bankers have responded en masse. There were more rate cuts around the world in August than there had been at any point since 2009. And there’s more to come. As Bloomberg [...]
Chinese monetary authorities announced today what will be for some of its banks a seventh round of “stimulus.” For the largest institutions, it will "only" be their sixth and the first one since January 2019. The PBOC has decided it is time for more RRR cuts. Effective September 16, the ratio all banks are required to hold of reserves will [...]
Where things stand right now is actually a pretty simple matter. How and why everything might change, as well as how and why we got here, those are more complex issues which depending upon your understanding may not lead to a clear picture of conditions. Right now, we are told, there will be just the one rate cut, maybe a [...]
It was framed as a good news/bad news sort of situation. For many, the entire issue of possible recession revolves around the service sector. As far as manufacturing goes, no one will argue otherwise; it’s already in trouble. But it’s a much smaller slice of overall economic activity, and unless we are talking 2008 levels of collapse there “needs” to [...]
Federal Reserve policymakers appear to have grown more confident in their more optimistic assessment of the domestic situation. Since cutting the benchmark federal funds range by 25 bps on July 31, in speeches and in other ways Chairman Jay Powell and his group have taken on a more “hawkish” tilt. This isn’t all the way back to last year’s rate [...]
Copper prices behave more deliberately than perhaps prices in other commodity markets. Like gold, it is still set by a mix of economic (meaning physical) and financial (meaning collateral and financing). Unlike gold, there doesn’t seem to be any rush to get to wherever the commodity market is going. Over the last several years, it has been more long periods [...]
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