Paul Volcker caused a minor stir last week releasing a book he has been working on. The aging former Federal Reserve Chairman apparently has a lot to say about the current state of affairs. “We’re in a hell of a mess in every direction,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times. No kidding; that about sums it [...]
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 housing slump accelerated in September. Matching the poor performance of resales, sales of newly constructed houses tumbled last month, too. According to the Census Bureau, there were 41k (unadjusted) single-family units sold. That’s down an alarming 18% from the same month last year. At a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 553k in September, the construction market is down for now [...]
True to form, whoever holds the government it is for them the best economy ever. It doesn’t matter political parties or otherwise affiliations. The rhetoric has become so unhinged that in the US former President Obama is trying to take credit for current President Trump’s economic “miracle” – that doesn’t actually exist. In India, the Modi government is following the [...]
For days after China shocked the world in August 2015, “devaluing” its currency seemingly out of nowhere, there was only confusion as to what had just happened. Going by nothing more than the mainstream media and economic narrative fed to it by central bankers and Economists (redundant), you wouldn’t have known anything was wrong at all. Manipulating currency for an [...]
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, [...]
Banks in China have to hoard liquidity ahead of their weeklong holidays, twice each year. The bigger of the two, related to the Chinese New Year, occurs in either January or February. The second, associated with China’s National Day, takes place at the beginning of every October and is still a formidable challenge to the monetary system. Depositories build up [...]
China’s economy is not crashing. Hyperbole works both ways. Last year and this, the smallest increment above a prior number was broadcast out as the greatest thing ever (US wage growth in particular), irrefutable proof of globally synchronized growth. Now that that’s over with, largely, there will be a tendency toward the other extreme. The latest Chinese economic statistics are [...]
If it sounds like the United States is divided and on the verge of some really nasty times, what must it be in Brazil? In early September, Presidential candidate Jair Messias Bolsonaro was stabbed in plain sight at a campaign rally, the attack caught on video and widely circulated worldwide. It was an ugly reminder of the direction being taken [...]
It used to be that if the US sneezed, the whole world would catch cold. Placed in terms of how the global economy worked, the point was easily made that US demand pretty much directed how it would fare for everyone else. Without US economic growth, the world would surely stumble as it had throughout modern history. Apparently, this is [...]
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