Was the GDP report good or bad? Six percent sure sounds terrific, given it wasn’t all that long ago two and a half or three was perceived a home run. As with any of these things, the ultimate judgement depends on more than single numbers because everything is relative. The fact is the BEA calculated a headline quarterly change which [...]
I told you last week that there were strange things going on in the labor market but I had no idea how much of an understatement that really was. Much of last week's economic focus was on the inflation report but I think the JOLTS report may turn out to be more significant. Inflation was indeed pretty hot year over [...]
For the month of May 2021, China’s General Administration of Customs believes the total US$ value of exports exiting that country was an impressive-sounding $263.9 billion. Compared to the US$ value of exports sent abroad in May 2020, this was a 27.9% increase. But base effects; exports in May 2020 had been a little more than 3% below those in [...]
The standard explanation for low bond yields has been driven by – who else? – Ben Bernanke summing up the view from econometrics. Term premiums, he says, these made-up decomposition components which only allow for QE to save a tiny bit of its face. In other words, QE obviously didn’t lead to recovery, it sure didn’t create modest let alone [...]
Twenty-fifteen was an important yet completely misunderstood year. The Fed was going to have to become hawkish, according to its models, yet oil prices crashed and the dollar continued to rise. Both of those things were described as “transitory” by Janet Yellen, and that they were helpful or positive (rising dollar means cleanest dirty shirt!), but domestically American policymakers’ clear [...]
The number illusion is a logical fallacy of sorts, an appeal to the authority of what looks like objectivity. You can’t argue with math. While that’s true, in social sciences there is the continued absence of real proofs which dominate the hard sciences. Newtonian physics works as a worldview because the numbers throughout history have always checked out.When an Economist [...]
According to one published study, the livestock population in China almost tripled in the three decades between 1980 and 2010. Not only that, the primary use of all those animals changed drastically, too. Prior, the backwards agrarian economy of the hardcore Maoist’s day didn’t eat its ox and cattle, rather such beasts of burden were used for the manual power [...]
It’s just not fast enough. And with the labor market spitting out numbers across a broad economic cross-section that look increasingly tired suggesting an economy running out of momentum, there’s the added urgency of time. Late summer figures still aren’t close to where they need to be even though when you view them in isolation they can look tremendous.Start with [...]
The good news: the World Trade Organization (WTO) has crunched the numbers for 2020’s horrific second quarter and where global trade is concerned it may not have been as bad as first feared. Make no mistake, it was bad but not crashing down as far as the most pessimistic of the dreamed-up scenarios. Given where things stand now with only [...]
It’s no wonder we’re obsessed with shoes these days. Even the V-people, as I’ll call them, keep one wary eye glued looking behind them. Survivor’s euphoria means a lot of potentially bad things, only beginning with a false sense of survivor-hood. We’ve so far made through only one big test, there are likely more to follow. And if they do, [...]
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