The payroll report wasn’t actually the first. The Treasury Department filed its Treasury International Capital (TIC) update yesterday, about two weeks late due to the federal government shutdown. However, since nobody follows it and the figures relate to a lot that’s beyond the US economy it doesn’t count in the mainstream view. That’s a shame because TIC will tell you [...]
A couple of new developments in China that are worth commenting on. First, what everyone is calling a stealth QE. It isn’t. The central bank bill swap program is instead designed for two purposes at once, neither of which will follow along like an LSAP. The intent in doing this specifically right now suggests something other than stimulus. People are [...]
Central bankers will often tell you exactly what you want to know, at least when it comes to their intentions. You can first begin by reading Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s 1963 monetary bible A Monetary History. It’s all in there. From it, central banks all over the world have devised technical schemes intended to hold fast to the old [...]
This is perhaps the perfect day to review what’s going on in Hong Kong (thanks J. Fraser). I’ll be in Vancouver over the weekend to talk about curves, so why not preface it with a little HKD update. With everyone focused elsewhere, the story of 2017, in my view, wasn’t so big in 2018. For reasons that will further disturb [...]
The English language headline for China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ press release on November 2018’s Big 3 was, National Economy Maintained Stable and Sound Momentum of Development in November. For those who, as noted yesterday, are wishing China’s economy bad news so as to lead to the supposed good news of a coordinated “stimulus” response this was itself a bad [...]
By the time things got really bad, China’s economy had already been slowing for a long time. The currency spun out of control in August 2015, and then by November the Chinese central bank was in desperation mode. The PBOC had begun to peg SHIBOR because despite so much monetary “stimulus” in rate cuts and a lower RRR banks were [...]
We can add this to the list of all the things going wrong in October. If it felt like a wave of renewed deflation built up and swept over markets and the global economy, it’s because that’s just what had happened. I don’t think it random coincidence the WTI curve went contango and oil prices globally crashed when they did. [...]
There was nothing really shocking about China’s monthly economic statistics for October 2018. The Big 3, Industrial Production, Retail Sales, and Fixed Asset Investment, all continue along in the same way. The Chinese economy is not crashing, it may be slowing, but most of all there isn’t any more upside. It’s the last one that is important. As such, Communist [...]
It’s one of those “nothing to see here” moments for Economists trying not to appreciate what's really going on in China therefore the global economy. The slump in China’s automotive sector dragged on through October, with year-over-year sales down for the fourth straight month. Auto sales last month were off 12% from a year earlier to 2.38 million, the government-backed [...]
It’s always a fine line for authorities. There are times when avoiding intervention is more effective than intervention. That’s particularly true when the efficacy of whatever proposed policy is in doubt. If you don’t know for sure that it will work, maybe don’t do it. There are often grave risks associated with plunging forward recklessly. In other words, officials can [...]
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