The BLS reported what was on the surface another lackluster payroll report. All the headline numbers conformed to the slowed economy view of 2016. The Establishment Survey gained just 156k in December, following an upward revised 204k in November. The 6-month average, a far more appropriate interpretation given inherent statistical volatility month to month, is just 189k. The Household Survey [...]
When the FOMC first voted to taper QE, all the way back in late 2013, they did so because their modeled projections were pointing up in every way. Among the positive factors in those equations was fiscal policy that moving forward into 2014 would be far less of a “restraint.” It has been a big point of emphasis in monetary [...]
In 2003, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas wrote admiringly in his Presidential address for the American Economic Association that the field of economics was itself a put-forward solution to the Great Depression. Such was the calamity that enormous intellectual effort was expanded so as to never repeat it. Though with that belated task there is also, or there at least should [...]
The main policymaking body of the Federal Reserve, the FOMC, has had a tortured relationship with eurodollar futures during this past decade. As I chronicled here in greater detail, starting in early 2007 the committee members decided that the deepest, broadest market in terms of money in human history could not possibly reflect accurate expectations. Ben Bernanke had told Congress [...]
Wages and slack have been at the center of the economic discussion for almost three years now. The massive shedding of employees that took place during the Great “Recession” left behind a huge pool of potential labor for the economy to work through as it was expected to recover. That never happened. So instead, economists have been working backward to [...]
As I wrote earlier, in orthodox economics it is actually possible to declare a depression and a recovery at the same time. The Federal Reserve’s statistic for Industrial Production actually contracted for a fifteenth straight month in November, an occurrence observed only eight other times in just about a century of data. Thus, if IP, as one of the four [...]
Last December, the Federal Reserve confirmed that it thought its monetary task was nearing completion but under conditions that’s its own data showed were nothing like recovery. In simple terms, they declared recovery and recession simultaneously on the exact same day. In orthodox economics, that isn’t actually impossible, though we have to define both terms. The factual basis for each [...]
Dating all the way back to February 11 and the Chinese turn on the “dollar”, the eurodollar futures curve had been stuck in a relatively narrow range. That trading band was widened a bit in June before and after Brexit (related to CNY’s regular mid-year drop), with futures on the whole curve bid up to early July and then slightly [...]
One of the most significant pieces of legislation ever argued and turned into law was the Banking Act of 1935. Maybe even more than the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the legislative basis for Executive Order 6102 and the end of gold inside the United States, the 1935 law codified what were in 1933 more properly observed as experiments. The [...]
After being pummeled by a concurrent stock and real estate crash, Japanese officials by late 1992 felt that enough was enough. The Nikkei 225 stock index that was nearly 40,000 toward the end of 1989 had crashed to below 15,000 by August 1992. From that point, however, Japanese stocks had started rising again. Through the summer of 1992, things looked [...]
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