Wholesale sales were flat in September, and flat overall for the quarter. They had declined sharply in July, rebounded in August, only to go nowhere for all the trouble. It is perfectly reminiscent of this whole economy, which fell in 2015 and then despite all projections otherwise never got back up. The best that can be said of it is [...]
When I first started some years ago, the guy I worked for told me to prepare myself because this business is so often just stupid. It does make sense given the high stakes and pressure, where everybody is literally trying to outsmart everybody else every minute of every day. And those kinds of conditions, variable as they are, lead to [...]
I never quite understood the “audit the Fed” trend that gained perhaps its widest acceptance as one of the final acts of Congressman Ron Paul’s career. He introduced H.R. 1207 as an amendment to Dodd-Frank, of all things, and even garnered 320 co-sponsors which aided the Congressman in getting it passed by the House. The Senate version was pared back [...]
The cost of this economy cannot be strictly measured by statistics or even the massive deviations of those statistics. As noted earlier today, China’s exports in the twelve months ending October 2016 were figured to be just $2.2 trillion. Had the Great “Recession” actually been a recession, where the world resumed growth even modestly like that from the pre-crisis period, [...]
In early November 2012, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that China’s exports were figured by the Customs Bureau to have been about $175.57 billion for October that year. It represented a year-over-year increase of 11.5% which only sounds good as compared to the economy that followed. The rate was down sharply from recovery-like growth that everyone had expected would [...]
For about the last two weeks, I have been writing about the contours of what I have perceived as a RMB liquidity operation that seems to be far more than the usual management of day-to-day confluences. Since the last week in October, RMB liquidity both onshore and offshore has been more and more plentiful but only in the shortest overnight [...]
The LMCI was positive in October for the third time in the past five months. Revisions are to be expected in any statistic, but more so with the Fed’s factor model by its construction where it has to predict certain parts of its nineteen inputs. Not all those statistics are readily available when it is published and many undergo benchmark [...]
As if anyone needed any proof as to why economics needs to be so thoroughly debunked, it was on display again today. I am talking about Rome over Carthage defeat, where the textbooks of Economics (capital “E”) should be so salted and devastated in the same manner in which the Romans banished the Carthaginians forever to nothing but history. Economics [...]
Popular convention purports that the Fed established its independence in 1951 when it told the Truman administration it would no longer fix a ceiling on government bond rates. The Treasury Department had to finance the Korean War and the administration expected all its agencies to fall in line. With the debacle of the Great Depression, and then the second error [...]
When life gives you lemons you intend to make lemonade, but in days long gone they often had to make due only with what was on hand. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were by pure accident, though I doubt many (or any) were as plain unsanitary as Hennig Brand’s discovery. He had been looking to find gold in urine, [...]
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