With auto sales coming in exceptionally weak in the retail sales report today and given the importance of the auto sector in an otherwise awful economy, it makes sense to go further in detail to try to tease out corroboration. The Bureau of Economic Analysis provides a wealth of supplementary data on motor vehicles that it uses to construct GDP. [...]
Economists setting their expectations for China and PBOC “stimulus” should have been paying attention to retail sales; not Chinese retail sales, but American. They keep seeing a rebound that just doesn’t exist. US consumers, as the central marginal marketplace for the world economy of goods, have steadfastly refused the invitation of the unemployment rate to produce a worldwide economic resurgence. [...]
On Wednesday, October 8, 2008, the FOMC voted for an emergency 50 bps cut in the federal funds rate, bringing it down to 1.50%. The day prior, the Fed announced that it would be buying short-term debt from businesses after suggesting the day before that it would fund up to $300 billion for “bad” assets. The Friday before that, Congress [...]
It’s not an exact fit or correlation, but that’s not the point. One follows the other, though the manner in which they relate is outside of any view. The point here is common sense, unclouded by the increasing absurdity with which this simple relationship is denied: Repo fails are an indication of collateral “tightness.” Dealer net long inventory is an [...]
Basic economics has proven that when the supply of something dwindles, absent an offsetting drop in demand the price should rise. When translating these fundamental terms to the labor market especially of the past few years, the supply means “slack” or the available pool of workers not yet working; demand has been, we are told repeatedly, very robust; therefore the [...]
The mainstream, dominant view of monetary policy remains as if it were “accommodative” or “stimulus.” Low rates and/or balance sheet expansion are treated as one and the same in terms of economic effects. The mountain of economic evidence since the end of the Great Recession, however, argues that that view is backward; starting with the observation that the Great Recession [...]
Under traditional “rules”, devaluing of a currency is supposed to bring about a measurable, even obvious increase in the export sector of the country undertaking the manipulation. The Japanese have been notorious for believing in the paradigm, and not just in the past four years under QQE and the whispers of it. Some people still believe that China is merely [...]
In early 2005, the US Senate began debating a bill seeking to impose a broad 27.5% tariff on Chinese exports to the United States. Congress was emotionally moved by the supposed problem of pegging the yuan to the dollar, then at about 8.28 CNY for every USD. In reality, the problem wasn’t so much dollars as “dollars”, meaning that because [...]
By experience of different kinds and settings of balance sheet expansion in the United States, Europe, and Japan, we can only conclude that monetary policy with these intentions has no effect, direct or otherwise, on inflation in each of these jurisdictions. The varied forms and exact nature of central bank execution allows us a broad and nearly comprehensive examination of [...]
Offering the longest track record of balance sheet policy, the Bank of Japan should have been a cautionary tale for the central banks that have since followed. Unfortunately, ideology at the center of monetary policy in all jurisdictions leaves no room for objective interpretation such as this. Economists and policymakers (redundant) believe QE works, full stop. When it doesn’t, such [...]
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