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’ [...]
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 [...]
Spend even a modest amount of time on the subject, and the distinct impression you are left with is that American ports and railyards are dealing with a truly epic jam because the economy has been so good there’s just too many goods for anyone to reasonably handle. Juiced by the federal government’s helicopters, Americans spent, spent some more, and [...]
Last night, Autodata reported its first estimates for September auto sales in the US. According to its own as well as those compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (the same government outfit which keeps track of GDP), vehicle sales have been sliding overall ever since April. For a couple months in the middle of Uncle Sam’s helicopter-fed frenzy, the [...]
How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion. What they found was that investors who check their performance less frequently are more willing to take risk and experience higher [...]
New orders, new orders, new orders. That’s the substance of the inventory cycle. A lot more of them, the upswing in it can remain intact keeping the global manufacturing economy humming along. Should they start to scale back and then, maybe at some point, decline, this unusual supply-constraint trend transitions toward a more historical inventory cycle on the downturn. As [...]
The inventory saga, planetary in its reach. As you’ve heard, American demand for goods supercharged by the federal government’s helicopter combined with a much more limited capacity to rebound in the logistics of the goods economy left a nightmare for supply chains. As we’ve been writing lately, a highly unusual maybe unprecedented inventory cycle resulted (creating “inflation”).The worse the shipping [...]
Valentine’s Day, and no one would love the US dollar. There was, instead, quite a lot of disdain for it fueling the usual loud voices who continue to hate it and predict its imminent demise year after year. This particularly lovely day in February 2018 seemed to have added more to the downside cheerleading; the US PPI came in red [...]
US stocks sold off last Monday due to fears over the potential - likely - failure of China Evergrande, a real estate developer that has suddenly discovered the perils of leverage. Well, that and the perils of being in an industry not currently favored by Xi Jinping. He has declared that houses are for living in, not speculating on, and [...]
Eurodollar, not Evergrande. That wasn’t just the point of yesterday’s recall, it is the whole point of beyond fourteen years of going only the wrong way. The deflationary way. Defaults in China are nowadays a commonplace part of that trend, one which began early in 2014 with Shanghai Chaori Solar.What was significant about Chaori was this: “It was the moment [...]
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