If there has been a lot different about the past few months, it was reflected in the TIC figures and then some. What is usually pretty easy to decipher, there were instead all sorts of shifts across the most important categories. For one, the foreign official sector was busy in December buying up UST’s and dollar assets just as the [...]
Real average weekly earnings for the private sector fell 0.6% year-over-year in January. It was the first contraction since December 2013 and the sharpest since October 2012. The reason for it is very simple; nominal wages remain stubbornly stagnant but now a rising CPI subtracts even more from them. Consumers receive no significant boost to their incomes, but are starting [...]
Industrial Production in the United States was flat in January 2017, following in December the first positive growth rate in over a year. The monthly estimates for IP are often subject to greater revisions than in other data series, so the figures for the latest month might change in the months ahead. Still, even with that in mind, there is [...]
Retail sales grew by 4.92% year-over-year in January 2017, the third consecutive month of gains around 5%. It was the first time for three months near that level since 2014. Given the behavior of the economy in the second half of last year it is almost eerie the similarity in behavior to the 2013-14 period. The statistics for neither period [...]
Economic Reports Scorecard The economic data since my last update has improved somewhat. It isn't across the board and it isn't huge but it must be acknowledged. As usual though there are positives and negatives, just with a slight emphasis on positive right now. Interestingly, the bond market has not responded to these slightly more positive readings with nominal and [...]
Janet Yellen was apparently “hawkish” again in her latest speech, though the reasons why she may have been continue to elude the media and many markets. In many ways, she doesn’t even know, a fact that she expressed several months ago to likewise very little appreciation. The FOMC may or may not raise rates in the next meeting or the [...]
Economists have always fashioned themselves in the style of physicists. They endlessly scrawl incomprehensible equations on blackboards because it is the epitome of science, the allure of great intelligence seemingly to do great things. But where physicists have continued to describe and solve some of the world’s great mysteries, Economists only bungle. They described free trade from among the myriad [...]
Earlier this week Bloomberg published an absurd story trying to claim that Donald Trump is being warned by foreign holders of US debt. Warned about what, the article didn’t say, so we can reasonably speculate (unlike the article) it was about politics. Bloomberg never did seem to report any such spreading alarm throughout the last Obama years even though selling [...]
In the middle of 1919, the United States was beset by a great many imbalances. Having just conducted a wartime economy, almost everything before then had been absorbed by the World War I effort. With fiscal restraint subsumed by national emergency, inflation was the central condition. Given that the Federal Reserve was by then merely a few years old, no [...]
If a central bank is doing something, you can almost be assured that at its theoretical root lies a statement or idea proposed by Milton Friedman in the 1960’s. This is not to say that Friedman would approve of what has been done in his name, even before he died a decade ago he became flustered over what his disciples, [...]
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