The wholesale level of the supply chain continued its divergence, though it seems increasingly likely that inventories have at least rolled over even if they are still building. Sales fell by 4.2% unadjusted year-over-year while inventories were up only 1.8%. That was the slowest inventory growth since the summer of 2010, but it still leaves the inventory gap as unbelievably [...]
When the June 2018 eurodollar futures price touched above 98.50 on October 2, I thought that was an impressive bid suggesting just how much negativity had survived the August liquidations. It was interrupted by some backward optimism about China’s October Golden Week, but the eurodollar curve overall with the June 2018 maturity as a specific interaction point for monetary policy [...]
When real household spending fell by 4.6% in April 2014 it was cause for concern. That was the first month after the tax hike hit and the decline in spending was much larger than anticipated (by economists, at least). Despite the heavy toll, Bank of Japan officials remained (outwardly) wholly unconcerned over what was believed a minor setback on the [...]
If the world is poised upon the precipice of “deflation” and the ugly economic consequences of reduced “money supply”, at the middle of all that are the primary dealers – still. While it is technically correct to claim that the Fed expanded its balance sheet to $4.5 trillion, with $2.4 trillion left after autonomous factors for bank “reserves”, that actually [...]
K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple Stupid – An acronym used in the US military; a design principle; unnecessary complexity should be avoided. The acronym KISS is just another way of expressing Occam’s Razor or maybe Einstein’s admonition that everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler. That the simplest answer is usually the most correct is an adage [...]
How did the world get this way? I don’t mean the oncoming recession, if that is indeed, as it appears, the economy’s fate. How did the payroll statistics ever attain this kind of deference and even religious zeal? U.S. manufacturing is shrinking, corporate profits are declining and goods are piling up on warehouse shelves. Those trends have elevated concern that [...]
If the Chinese were intent on financial reform, and that meant trying perhaps the impossible task of a managed bubble deformation, the genesis of the idea was forged in the United States. China’s vast industrial machine was made to service US consumers and financed with the full throat of eurodollar expansion, leaving so many goods for sale in US stores [...]
Despite the disappointing headline Establishment Survey estimate, those inclined to believe the payroll report as an overall economic narrative had two fallback issues. U.S. employment gains slowed more than expected in January as the boost to hiring from unseasonably mild weather faded, but surging wages and an unemployment rate at an eight-year low suggested the labor market recovery remains firm. [...]
The headline Establishment Survey number disappointed at just 151k in January. The figure does not represent the actual amount of jobs gained, of course, since employment in January is typically about 3 million less than December. What that estimate represents is a combination of imputations about seasonality (comparing the actual change in the data set to the “typical” decline December [...]
With the BLS’s release of Q4 productivity figures, we get to check the BLS’s estimates just in time for tomorrow’s increasingly irrelevant payroll report. That much has become thoroughly apparent especially since the middle of last year as the Establishment Survey and unemployment rate only diverge with the overall breadth of economic indications. With GDP no longer corroborative, the labor [...]
Stay In Touch