It was another one of those good news, bad news data days in China. Unfortunately, the good news just doesn’t make much sense. That was Chinese exports which, according to the country’s General Administration of Customs, increased by 4.5% year-over-year in April 2020. Given the state of the world last month, exports were expected to drop by 12 to 14% [...]
There are two parts behind the inflation mongering. The first, noted yesterday, is the Fed’s balance sheet, particularly its supposedly monetary remainder called bank reserves. The central bank is busy doing something, a whole bunch of something, therefore how can it possibly turn out to be anything other than inflationary?The answer: the Federal Reserve is not a central bank, not [...]
It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though when it was announced it was still quite a lot to take in. On September 1, 2005, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the nation’s personal savings rate had turned negative during the month of July. The press release announcing the number, in trying to explain the result was reduced instead to a [...]
It was an absolutely mad scramble. Banking difficulties in the Fed’s sixth district, the Atlanta branch, had sparked an irresistible wave of panic which spread throughout the Eastern seaboard. By December 1930, it had reached the streets of New York City – the world’s monetary capital. On December 11, customer withdrawals had left the Bank of the United States with [...]
Trading partners like Mexico didn’t have a labor participation problem by which to hide the economic downturn last year. The whole idea of “decoupling” in the 2018 sense of the word was how the US economy, by virtue of its 50-year low unemployment rate, couldn’t possibly be as weak as it increasingly appeared overseas. The US was good, they kept [...]
Anna Jacobson Schwartz often gets buried under the mountains of study Milton Friedman conducted on his own. Contrary to what some, perhaps many, might think, Friedman didn’t write A Monetary History by himself. Anna Schwartz was his co-author for what would become one of the most important volumes of economic scholarship of the entire 20th century.Pretty much every central bank [...]
iTunes: https://apple.co/3czMcWN Google-cast: https://shorturl.at/fpsEJ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3arP8mY Alhambra-tube: below SUMMARY Hubris. It will get us to the stars but seduce us into believing we belong there. Today, monetary authorities suffer it, believing they can manage the nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation and feedback loops of the unraveling. DESCRIPTION In 1929 a plague struck Florida resulting in an overwhelming government response. [...]
The Japanese went ahead with it anyway. Real GDP had bounced back, sort of, from a near recession in 2018. Central bankers at the Bank of Japan had reassured Shinzo Abe that the economy was on the mend. Therefore, the second round of the VAT tax hike, an imposition which had been postponed since 2015, could go ahead in 2019. [...]
He called it “unfair competition.” That’s one way to describe it, surely not the proper way. But who could blame the guy? After all, these were not normal times though at the time hardly anyone had yet realized it.James J. Davis was the second person to hold the title Secretary of Labor. Appointed by Warren Harding, he began his tenure [...]
Following along the same top-down model, what unites central bankers and socialists is equality. Handing over significant authority to either results in everyone being equally impoverished. And, therefore, those very authorities fighting over minute scraps so as to display some sense of accomplishment.In October 2015, safely nested within the cozy confines of Brookings, being paid handsomely to opine on matters [...]
Stay In Touch