Brazilian stocks closed out January on an impressive run. Like stock markets all over the rest of the emerging market economies, Brazil’s has been on fire. The Sao Paolo Bovespa stock index had stumbled a bit in the middle of December, coinciding with a drop in the real against the dollar in that fit of global illiquidity, but between December [...]
What happened to the recovery? It’s a complex question with a surprisingly simple answer. The density of the topic, particularly entangled as it was in close proximity to the calamity of the Great “Recession”, clouded the diagnosis. If you ask ten different academic economists you might get ten different answers, though I suspect seven or eight of them would be [...]
It’s kind of a cheap shot to go back and rehash corporate statements from way back in the past. Still, when the topic is banking and why the monetary system refuses more than intermittent and minor progress, it’s worth the revisit. What’s different now than before 2008, really August 2007, is far more than regulation. It’s the attitude that’s changed. [...]
The storm-assisted car-fest that ended last year appears to be fully winding down. Automakers overall posted weak sales to start 2018. They are putting on their best face, admitting widely that this year was going to be a tough one anyway as if they expected it. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, total sales (seasonally-adjusted) in January 2018 were [...]
The unemployment rate, I’m sorry to report, didn’t tumble all the way to zero. Pity. It did stay at 4.1% for the fourth straight month. Because of that, wage pressures should be exploding right now. That seems to be the verdict in markets this morning, a rumble of inflation shot right through everything at the release of the payroll report. [...]
One more point on the hourly compensation estimates as they relate to this supposed labor shortage. As I wrote in examining the Beveridge Curve from a different, and ultimately more consistent, perspective: It just doesn’t work that way. In a real labor shortage, wage gains wouldn’t be modest because they couldn’t be modest. If they are modest, then the shortage [...]
If there is a boom here, I just don’t see it. Perhaps the term itself needs to be clearly defined. The common definition is a broad-based and sustained expansion, one that is beneficial to a wide cross-section of any society experiencing it. Since this is still nominally a capitalist system, eroded as it may be in some parts, “broad” would [...]
According to China’s official PMI’s, those looking for a boom to begin worldwide in 2018 after it failed to materialize in 2017 are still to be disappointed. If there is going to be globally synchronized growth, it will have to happen without China’s participation in it. Of course, things could change next month or the month after, but this idea [...]
You have to go back four years for some honesty. The FOMC in January 2014 could be more forthright simply because the committee’s members believed they wouldn’t ever have to explain themselves. They voted to taper QE at the end of 2013 with the expectation that the economy would perform as their econometric models laid out. Thus, they could say: [...]
It’s interesting, to me anyway, that an image of the Roman goddess Juno remains to this day on the logo of the Bank of England. There are many stories about her role as it relates to money, but what cannot be denied is that the very word itself came to us from her temple. The Latin moneta was derived from [...]
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