Factory orders rebounded in March, though that term increasingly does not apply to the situation at hand. In seasonally-adjusted terms, March factory orders were about $10 billion more than February, a little over 2% month-over-month, but that doesn’t adequately describe the relevant context and trend. An actual rebound would suggest a quick and pain-free rejoining of a temporary deviation back [...]
I think we are getting an even better sense of what might be the most ironclad law of orthodox economics. It seems as if there is a nonlinear proportionality between the desperation in which the mainstream denies it and the farther away from recovery the economy becomes. Last year was full of denial, especially as it related to that “anomaly” [...]
Rhetorically, I wondered yesterday what it was that economists and the media were actually looking at when opining about certain economic topics. That was in relation to German factory orders which are clearly moving in the “wrong” direction, to which that is supposed to be set aside in favor of “sentiment” and the ephemeral “confidence.” Neither of those words really [...]
The ECB having announced and then implemented at least some kind of QE plan, the entire economist community has adjusted their economic projections upward in uniform, flocking fashion. They haven’t had to make much of an adjustment because they never downgraded economic expectations much to begin with. That is why almost every news story about the economy (and not just [...]
In viewing incoming data for January, it looked as if the “dollar” being exactly right about the US economy’s place within the falling global economy was increasingly correct. At that time, the declines in many accounts were way beyond even what we saw of 2014’s “snowy” disruption. That itself suggested that any repeat in 2015 was more than simple repetition, [...]
The continued release of increasingly bad data serves to further isolate the payroll report as something residing only of its own accord. There are far more relevant pieces of evidence that are clearly free of overly-dependent assumptions about factors that are less and less relevant to the actual economy as it exists post-crisis – and really post-2012. While the Establishment [...]
It may be progress in some sense, but we have apparently shifted beyond the “unexpected” stages of the economy. Disappointing data, as with the crude oil collapse, is now being termed “temporary.” That was the case with almost all the data this week, including factory orders, all of which was disappointing and thus “temporary.” But with domestic demand picking up, [...]
Courtesy of James Pethokoukis of the AEI, today we learn that Joe LaVorgna, Chief Economist at Deutsche Bank, noticed, “Over the past year, the US economy has demonstrated a significant acceleration.” The reason for such cheeriness is the “private economy.” In other words, if you take out the “fiscal drag” of purported austerity, the indication of GDP is very encouraging. [...]
If one were to objectively at a broad range of data points, you might be tempted to declare, as the NBER does, a cycle peak for some time in mid-2012 (perhaps October?). Given yesterday’s update to GDP, increasing the growth rate by 0.8% to an illusory 3.6%, one might also conclude a peak in the mini-cycle. Of all the subcomponents, [...]
There was not much unexpected in the factory order data, in fact it was right in line with what we have seen for nearly a year. Orders ticked up slightly, but not outside of expected volatility. The six-month average of Y/Y growth in shipments ex transportation was stuck for a second straight month at close to zero; and fell 0.4% [...]
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