Score one for Chinese consistency. Back in December, Chinese officials suddenly announced that they were pulling back the Minxin PMI’s of smaller and mid-sized businesses in both manufacturing and services. Broadcasting the need for “major adjustments”, China Minsheng Banking Corp. and the China Academy of New Supply-side Economics had previously estimated a huge decline in economic activity suggested by their [...]
Standard Chartered reported a massive yearly loss for 2015, the bank’s first in almost thirty years. The results were so bad that the company has publicly stated it might even “claw back” bonuses from about 140 executives. If the firm is truly interested in assigning blame, however, it might first look to Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen (as primary representatives [...]
I wrote last week about the OECD’s sudden alarm over global growth “flatlining” but I think it important and relevant to further emphasize why. If you go back only to June last year, their economic outlook for the world sounds distinctly familiar. The OECD has cut its global economic growth forecast for this year but says it expects lower oil [...]
It has become cliché that commentary continues toward the increasingly absurd at the expense of the obvious and all because Janet Yellen says there can’t possibly be anything wrong. The degree to which the broader markets agree in that sense has certainly lessened of late, but that only suggests the increasingly bizarre platitudes offered to do anything other than confirm [...]
Total Social Financing (TSF) in China jumped in January which really wasn’t surprising given that the figure captures much of the central bank and whatever it does – which was a lot in January. Loan growth, too, surged giving the mainstream a desperate boost even if these estimates don’t mean what everyone seems to think. This is the typical response [...]
Markets stabilized some last week, stocks large, small, emerging and foreign finding a bid. Short covering for sure, but maybe some real buying too; there are a lot more cheap stocks around right now than there has been in quite a while. Value players are starting to pick around in the debris of the materials sector. Energy companies have found [...]
This past week, the S&P 500 Cap-Weighted Index ((IVV)) tested and then broke strong support at the 50 and 200-day moving averages after a remarkable rebound from its crushing meltdown in August of last year. Look for a possible bounce here, so long as it can get above resistance at the 1950 level, as the market is slightly oversold. The S&P 500 [...]
When Janet Yellen testified to Congress last week, she was as usual careful with her words. Alan Greenspan once called it “mumbling with incoherence” but there is very little left to rambling in Yellen’s predicament. Where Greenspan was once the “maestro” and Bernanke the “hero” Yellen is stuck holding the bag, and I think she knows it. In truth, there [...]
Maybe after a couple generations the Japanese have finally had enough. Perhaps QQE was large enough so as to leave no doubt that not only did it fail, but that it was the same result registered time and again before. The Bank of Japan has promulgated eleven QE’s dating back to 2001, but this last one might have done so [...]
If the US consumers and attendant “demand” had been relatively weak entering 2015 producing even at that point questionable conditions that are now admitted as a manufacturing recession, it is increasingly clear that “something” changed around the middle of the year. Obviously, market turmoil that had been largely focused overseas suddenly swung internally to capture US markets once though invulnerable, [...]
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