There are two very big problems with these constant, increasingly shrill labor market anecdotes. The first is that they don’t end up meaning what the tellers think they do. The purpose of these stories is clear enough, it’s just that the logic doesn’t work in the end. Here’s another example from the Wall Street Journal this week. Companies are now, [...]
Inflation hysteria and the boom hysteria may both seem like they are one and the same thing. They are related, sure, and they represent similar objects. However, there are subtle differences. The mania over inflation, for example, has subsided while the one about the economy reaches its own feverish pitch. In early June, Newt Gingrich appeared on ABCNews’ The View [...]
CNY has held up over the last few days after Chinese officials intervened. Central bank actions like these tend to work if only over the very shortest timeframes. The tentative calm there, however, hasn’t extended universally. Copper, for one, has fallen right out of its Reflation #3 range. Selling off solidly for almost a month now, today it was pounded [...]
Chinese officials are getting nervous. Everyone knows that whenever your favorite sports team struggles and fans are calling for the head coach’s head, any owner or general manager who then issues the dreaded (from the coach’s perspective) vote of confidence is essentially sealing his fate. PBOC Governor Yi Gang issued a similar sort of statement today. CNY is in freefall, [...]
Mexico will have a new President on December 1. Falling short in each of the prior two elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador won convincingly this time. Though a thorough leftist, AMLO, as he is called in Mexico, ran on the familiar populist, anti-establishment topics. For yet another country its political background has shifted dramatically. Mexicans are apparently completely fed up [...]
There are several factors missing from the latest eurodollar rout. Well, not really missing so much as sitting this one out to this point in time. We knew things were really getting serious in 2015 when the Japanese yen joined the currency parade. Only it didn’t fall as others had, JPY rather rose very much against the Bank of Japan. [...]
The plural of anecdote is not data. At any given time in any given economy you can find counterexamples. During the Great Depression, for example, millions of Americans were doing very well for themselves. It wasn’t difficult to locate and talk to those who were prospering during what was a legitimate catastrophe. It’s never all or nothing. Rather, the issue [...]
In July 2014, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen testified before Congress. It was the usual Humphrey-Hawkins stuff, except in this instance at that particular time there was every reason to suspect things were finally changing. The unemployment rate, in particular, was sinking like a stone dropped in a pond. Some additional economic indicators signaled perhaps the pathway toward substantial improvement [...]
Not a good day to be a global central bank. Competitive devaluations all around? Kidding aside, it’s getting serious in China. CNY DOWN = BAD, so says Big Mama. "The kind of dollar selling from that bank was so aggressive that we knew instantly that it must be from the Big Mama," said a Shanghai-based senior currency trader at an [...]
I missed durable goods last month for scheduling reasons, which was a shame given that May is the month each year for benchmark revisions to the series. Since new estimates under the latest revisions were released today, it seems an appropriate time to revisit the topic of data bias, and why that matters. What happens with durable goods (or any [...]
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