A couple of Economists have caused some noise by reviewing consumer confidence estimates in the United States, associating big declines in them with imminent recession, and then pointing out such substantial drops in both of the major consumer sentiment surveys just recently. If valid, their correlations would seem to suggest a US contraction.We’re meant to take these seriously for one [...]
OK, so we went through the ways and reasons consumer price increases are not inflation, cannot be inflation, are nowhere near actual inflation, and what all that really means. The rate they’ve gone up hasn’t been due to an overactive Federal Reserve, so it has to be something else. This is why, though the bulge has been painful, it’s already [...]
122.2 Commodity Prices Are Telling Us This... ———Ep 122.2 Summary———We review palladium, copper and iron ore - all metals and minerals that peaked in value in May (lumber too). Some commodities continue to rise in value, specifically energy. How do we reconcile the deflationary/disinflationary former to the inflationary latter? Also, US auto sales. ———Sponsor———Macropiece Theater with Alistair Cooke (i.e. Emil Kalinowski) [...]
More inflation numbers around the world, more of the same. Producer prices, this time. Beginning in the US, the annual rates remain high and reached a little higher in September 2021. Commodities have been the highest of all, up 20.47% year-over-year for another greatest increase since the mid-seventies. The PPI for final demand goods was up 11.68%, that the most [...]
122.1 US Dollar Outgains All! (...except for one??) ———Ep 122.1 Summary———The US dollar is rising in value against a collection of currencies (except one). It's disconfirming evidence of sustainable economic recovery; it implies strained USD-funding. And there's still that one key, stable currency - unusually stable; suspiciously stable.———Sponsor———Macropiece Theater with Alistair Cooke (i.e. Emil Kalinowski) reading the latest essays, blog posts, [...]
There was never really any answer given by the Chinese Communists for why their own export data diverged so much from other import estimates gathered by its largest trading partners. Ostensibly different sides of the same thing, it’s not like anyone asked Xi Jinping to weigh in; they report what numbers they have and consider them authoritative.However, the United States’ [...]
It is costing more to live and be, so naturally people are looking for who it is they need to blame. Maybe figure out some way to stop it. You know and feel for the basics since everyone’s perceptions begin with costs of just living. This is what makes the subject of inflation so difficult, even more so in the [...]
Forgotten now, overridden by the arrival of the coronavirus, Germany’s economy was already well into recession before COVID. Quite a long time before. It wasn’t an earth-shattering collapse reaching downward to an incredible depth, that became the later effect of overreacting to the pandemic. We will simply never know what that prior contraction would have looked like, and how bad [...]
The number of Job Openings for the month of July were revised upward, the BLS now thinking there had been more than 11 million of them during that month. Companies seem to be desperate for workers, at least judging by this one measure. The latest estimate for August 2021 came in well short of either the revised figure (11.1 million) [...]
It was one of those signals which mattered more than the seemingly trivial details surrounding the affair. The name MF Global doesn’t mean very much these days, but for a time in late 2011 it came to represent outright fear. Some were even declaring it the next “Lehman.” While the “bank” did eventually fail, and the implications of it came [...]
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