If anyone might wonder why yesterday and today seem far less noteworthy and less perhaps dangerous, the Chinese are once again on holiday. The Mid-Autumn festival began yesterday and extends today. The last money market trading, then, was early Thursday morning with offshore CNH coming back down if only slightly. What commentary there is in relation to CNH continues to [...]
It follows that if we find production dropping into a two-year slump, sales are likely the cause. Retail sales continue to be just as stuck as the rest of the economy, an economic limbo between growth and recession with far more of recession than growth. After suffering one of the worst months in July, retail sales bounced back in August [...]
Industrial production in the United States fell by 1.1% year-over-year in August, a slightly larger decline than the -0.6% estimated for each of the two months prior. August’s negative was the twelfth consecutive, marking a full year in slow but unusually persistent contraction at such a slope. The seasonally-adjusted peak was reached in November 2014, meaning that for almost two [...]
For some reason Alan Greenspan’s opinions are still taken seriously. No one single person has done more to damage the economic long run that his Keynesian training told him would never matter. We are living in that increasingly desolate long run, and yet somehow to the media to some nontrivial extent beyond it he has maintained credibility. What is most [...]
In many ways it is surprising the bond selloff hasn’t been bigger. After all, the recovery narrative of the unemployment rate has had almost everything going for it since February, at least in terms of perceptions playing into expectations. There was the usual spring rebound in economic data that aided in the “worst is past” argument, while oil prices and [...]
Treasury bill rates have been trading notably higher of late, with the 3-month bill equivalent yield as much as 37 bps this week. Though it was the highest rate since November 2008, a true reading of bill history shows that it is not a matter of Fedearl Reserve policy “normalization.” Trading in bills, especially the 3-month, makes indications of risk [...]
There is validity in (not “to”) the myth of central banking, one that has important and very serious implications right down the smallest and most immediate terms. The first task of every central bank was currency elasticity, which simply meant the bank would endeavor to supply (at penalty rates, according to Bagehot, such that banks do not fund themselves on [...]
At the end of August, the US Energy Information Administration reported that it had been overstating domestic demand for oil and energy products to a considerable degree. Using imprecise and lagging data, the calculations for the amount of product being exported overseas was understated by an average of 16%. That meant more output was being used elsewhere, thus less product [...]
The US is not alone in its corporate profit slump. In China, profits at State-Owned Enterprises fell a further 6.5% year-over-year in the January to July period. Estimated to have been RMB 1.31 trillion (about $195 billion), SOE profits are being dragged down by those firms under control of the central government. Locally-administered SOE’s showed net income declining by only [...]
The yield on the 10-year US Treasury closed at around 1.68% today, but judging by the haughty commentary surrounding global bond markets you would be forgiven if you thought it was 2.68%. Since the low in July around 1.37%, that +30 bps apparently seems like it to many people. Going back to the end of QE2, the idea that rates [...]
Stay In Touch