Today’s release of personal income and spending is very much related to the revised GDP figures, though I have no doubt that the BEA wishes it were not. To start with, the ongoing chain of benchmark revisions has produced an inordinately volatile set of economic accounts. That is quite against the stated purpose of all this adjusting and statistical intrusiveness; [...]
When looking at cyclical inflections, GDP is the last to know about it. That has been the case at cyclical turns in each of the last three peaks, most especially how GDP treated the first half of the Great Recession. More recently, given the abomination of cyclical behavior, GDP finally after three years caught up with the 2012 slowdown. As [...]
According to the latest GDP revisions I may have been off in my projection of where the recession began. I wrote in 2013 that if pressed I would name October 2012 as the start of the recession. There were many reasons for that assessment; retail sales suddenly and sharply slowing, durable goods and particularly capital goods orders contracting and a [...]
For once, the Fed gets it right. Actually, it is three times and only certain parts of the Fed, as the agency is by no means monolithic. In the first two, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker nailed the preliminary GDP estimate for the second straight quarter. You can appreciate why they unveiled it just recently despite it’s existence going back [...]
IBM continues to be a bellwether assessment on domestic and global capex, though in 2015 almost everyone wishes it wasn’t. To that end, many have started to downgrade Big Blue based on age in the business cycle and, of course, currency. In many ways, the latest quarterly stumble is the mirror image of when all this started. Plotting IBM’s transformation, [...]
Factory orders rebounded in March, though that term increasingly does not apply to the situation at hand. In seasonally-adjusted terms, March factory orders were about $10 billion more than February, a little over 2% month-over-month, but that doesn’t adequately describe the relevant context and trend. An actual rebound would suggest a quick and pain-free rejoining of a temporary deviation back [...]
I think we are getting an even better sense of what might be the most ironclad law of orthodox economics. It seems as if there is a nonlinear proportionality between the desperation in which the mainstream denies it and the farther away from recovery the economy becomes. Last year was full of denial, especially as it related to that “anomaly” [...]
More bad news for the rest of the world, or at least the world’s economists, that has been anticipating the US economy as a means by which to expel negative economic forces. The idea of decoupling is not just something that suggests the US economy is moving contrary to all the rest, but also the sole source of hope for [...]
The biggest challenge for the Federal Reserve in 2015 is going to be trying to convince everyone that it is meeting its dual mandate. That is true of every year, but this one is unique given the threats to undo ZIRP after more than six years of it. On the one hand, there is the “maximum employment” mandate seemingly arrived [...]
If payrolls were indeed expanding at a robust clip, then we should be able to look forward to a Christmas retail season more like pre-crisis than anything of the past few years (especially last year). Of course, most initial indications of expectations for spending actually seemed favorable to such an outcome, which may not have been surprising either way since [...]
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