Mario Draghi doesn’t have a whole lot going for him, but he is at least consistent - at times (yes, inconsistent consistency). Bloomberg helpfully reported yesterday how the ECB’s staff committee that produces the econometric projections has recommended the central bank’s Governing Council change the official outlook. Since last year, risks have been “balanced” in their collective opinion. Given what’s happened [...]
Cushing, OK, delivered what it could for the CPI. The contribution to the inflation rate from oil prices was again substantial in August 2018. The energy component of the index gained 10.3% year-over-year, compared to 11.9% in July. It was the fourth straight month of double digit gains. Yet, the CPI headline retreated a little further than expected. After reaching [...]
We’ve been here before. Economists and central bankers become giddy about the prospects for success, meaning actual recovery. For that to happen, reflation must first attain enough momentum. If it does, as is always forecast, reflation becomes recovery. The world then moves off this darkening path toward the unknown crazy. The problem has been that officials mistake reflation for what [...]
Is it a shortage of workers, or a shortage of work? Structural issues with Americans and who they are, or macro issues about which Americans have been fed a load of crap for more than a decade? You can see why those who may have been manufacturing raw manure might have an interest in swaying the debate toward the structural. [...]
Over the weekend, another European nation turned toward the populist direction. It was enough to get one’s attention when Italy did it, but Sweden is something else altogether. The country has been long held out as an exemplar of everything that is right with globalization. They have industry, youth, etc. How in the world could another “far right” party score [...]
In the absence of a booming economy, one has been conjured from a select few employment statistics. The catalog, beginning in 2014, consisted of a rapidly falling unemployment rate, the Establishment Survey which dazzled with headline payroll growth supposedly adding up to the “best jobs market in decades”, and the JOLTS series but curiously omitting everything but the Job Openings [...]
The Boston Fed held its 62nd Annual Economic Conference over the weekend. Not quite as well-known as the KC Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium, this Eastern branch’s meeting still attracts many big-name speakers. The “right” speakers, that is, meaning academic and mainstream bank Economists, supranational think tank thinkers, as well as current and former central bankers. The echo chamber is just [...]
For the first half of the Great “Recession”, China and the rest of the EM world seemed immune. It was American subprime mortgages that we were told was causing all the problems, and if European banks had somehow gotten themselves entangled in the rotten real estate mess so much the better for where growth was invulnerable. This first instance of [...]
The Great "Recession" was never a recession. It was a monetary event first and foremost, and it continues to be eleven years later. That means by and large it has been a failure of imagination. Central bankers say they've done this and that, but what they've never done, apart from actually succeed, is examine the way money actually works in [...]
This year is just different. Increasingly so. Not just in one or two places, either, but in way too many places. In Japan, for instance, real Household Spending rose by the smallest amount in July, according to the latest estimates from Statistics Japan. In 2017, this would have been a worrisome sign. In 2018, it counts as one of the [...]
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