You just don’t see $4 billion monthly retail sales revisions, in either direction. Advance estimates are changed all the time, each monthly figure will be recalculated twice after its initial release. Typically, though, the subsequent revisions are minor rarely amounting to a billion. Four times that? Last month, the Census Bureau reported that retail sales during the Christmas holiday were [...]
Over the last decade, the US economy has been experiencing “residual seasonality.” It has begun each year unusually weak. For Economists expecting it take off in each and every one, this is more than a thorny contradiction. When it happened again in 2015, at the worst possible moment for the mainstream view, they had finally had enough. The Bureau of [...]
For much of 2018, the idea of “overseas turmoil” lived up to its name. At least in economic terms. Market-wise, there was a lot domestically to draw anyone’s honest attention. Warnings were everywhere by the end of the year. And that was what has been at issue. Some said Europe and China are on their own, the US is cocooned [...]
Ignore Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Those are merely an appetizer, an intentional preamble to whet the appetite of hungry consumers looking to splurge. The real action comes in December. People look, some buy, after Thanksgiving, but as anyone counts down the actual twelve days of Christmas and celebrates the eight crazy nights of Hanukkah that’s when the retail industry [...]
If there is one small silver lining from 2018’s economic performance, it is that Milton Friedman’s interest rate fallacy is being robustly proven yet again. Many Economists will have you believe that low interest rates, short or long, are stimulus. This is a huge mistake. Here’s what Friedman said in December 1997: As the economy revives, however, interest rates would [...]
How quickly hope can sour. That is, if it is based on suspect assumptions and a misreading of the general situation. It would then be more like irrational pleading than derived from solid analysis. One year ago, thereabouts, President Trump delivered upon one campaign pledge. He pushed a tax reform bill through Congress aiming to offer benefits to both the [...]
We will hear all day and for the next month (at least) about the two best quarters of GDP growth in four years. Somehow this will be used to justify calling this an economic boom, even though those two quarters in 2014 supposedly didn’t qualify. And they were better quarters, at least so far as real GDP goes. Knee-jerk reactions [...]
The Bank of Canada held its benchmark overnight rate steady at its last meeting in early September. Like the Federal Reserve, Canada’s central bank has been “tightening.” The policy lever had been lifted four times starting in July 2017. It is expected that when monetary officials meet in Ottawa tomorrow they will vote for a fifth. In recent weeks, though, [...]
The clock really was ticking on this so-called economic boom. A product in many economic accounts of Keynesian-type fantasy, the destructive effects of last year’s hurricanes in sharp contrast to this year’s (which haven’t yet registered a direct hit on a major metropolitan area or areas, as was the case with Harvey and Irma) meant both a temporary rebound birthed [...]
For the second consecutive month, retail sales recorded by gasoline stations surged by an annual rate of more than 20%. It was the fourth month in a row where sales have been up by nearly that amount. Last year’s jump in oil prices is feeding through in a number of ways. From headline inflation rates to now consumer spending, the [...]
Stay In Touch