Is it really that simple? The central bank hands out “free” money or “supports” markets with purchases, so that’s all there is to it. Once Jay Powell or Christine Lagarde moves in with the big bazookas, who’s not going to climb on board the money train as it rockets out of the inflation station?If only Weimar was that easy. Easy [...]
It wasn’t entirely unexpected, though when it was announced it was still quite a lot to take in. On September 1, 2005, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the nation’s personal savings rate had turned negative during the month of July. The press release announcing the number, in trying to explain the result was reduced instead to a [...]
The Federal Reserve reported yesterday that revolving consumer credit in the US rose by a seasonally adjusted $10 billion in the month of July 2019. That was the largest single monthly increase since November 2017. Given how the latter month was related to “residual seasonality”, meaning Americans spending perhaps more than they wanted for the Christmas holiday, and the middle [...]
It was a forgettable moment. The Federal Reserve’s Chairman at the time, Janet Yellen, was asked about a key economic statistic and she just couldn’t come up with it. In September 2016, Yellen was on Capitol Hill to testify as she usually did about how things were surely getting better. Rep. Frank Guinta wanted to know what that might mean [...]
The Boston Fed held its 62nd Annual Economic Conference over the weekend. Not quite as well-known as the KC Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium, this Eastern branch’s meeting still attracts many big-name speakers. The “right” speakers, that is, meaning academic and mainstream bank Economists, supranational think tank thinkers, as well as current and former central bankers. The echo chamber is just [...]
Americans are eschewing credit cards in 2018. Outside of a big jump in revolving credit balances in May, through June 2018 the Federal Reserve reports only small gains in the total aggregate balance. Given, however, the propensity of this data to be significantly revised, we can’t really be sure as to what’s happened. With the data we have now, there [...]
US consumers continue to recover from their debt splurge at the end of last year. Combined with still weaker income growth, the Federal Reserve estimates that aggregate revolving credit balances grew only marginally for the fourth straight month in April 2018. To put it in perspective, the total for revolving credit (seasonally adjusted) is up a mere $2.2 billion for [...]
Despite last month’s substantial revisions that wiped out most of “residual seasonality” from the seasonally adjusted revolving consumer credit series, it still remains for this year. The Federal Reserve staff eliminated the large swings in credit card use pivoting around the Christmas holiday. Consumers buy up a lot of stuff in advance of it, and then spend some several months [...]
One of main elements of the true seasonal Q1 weakness, or what has been called residual seasonality, has been the embrace of revolving credit. The Federal Reserve’s statistics for consumer credit over the last two years has displayed a pronounced trend, especially at the end of last year. Americans had, it seemed, made heavy use of credit cards (and other [...]
Our contention behind “residual seasonality” has always been that there is no residual but to some extent an understandable and easily explainable seasonal issue. Each Q1 appears to be unusually weak because, well, it is unusually weak. The reason is simply Christmas. Americans splurge for the holiday and then spend the first several months of the following year to some [...]
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