It took some doing, and some time, but Mexico has managed to bring its car production back up to more normal levels. For two months, there had been practically zero automaking in one of the biggest auto-producing nations. Getting back near where things left off, however, isn’t exactly a “V” shaped recovery; it’s only halfway.Two months of zero production are [...]
If that wasn’t the most anticlimactic worst economic quarter in history. The numbers were just as bad as people were expecting – which is the point. It’s not like this economic collapse snuck up on anyone, nor did its scale and depth. We’ve all known from the very beginning what the deal was going to be. Headline real GDP fell [...]
According to Germany’s ZEW, economic prospects for the intermediate future in that country (and for Europe, separate survey) haven’t been this positive since 2006. Back then you might remember the rip-roaring contributions of asset bubbles, and I don’t mean the stock market and valuations. A huge wave of credit expansion in pretty much every corner of the globe courtesy of [...]
A perpetual motion machine is impossible, but what about a perpetual inflation machine? This is supposed to be the printing press and central banks are, they like to say, putting it to good and heavy use. But never the inflation by which to confirm it.So round and round we go. The printing press necessary to bring about consumer price acceleration, [...]
Trading partners like Mexico didn’t have a labor participation problem by which to hide the economic downturn last year. The whole idea of “decoupling” in the 2018 sense of the word was how the US economy, by virtue of its 50-year low unemployment rate, couldn’t possibly be as weak as it increasingly appeared overseas. The US was good, they kept [...]
The Japanese went ahead with it anyway. Real GDP had bounced back, sort of, from a near recession in 2018. Central bankers at the Bank of Japan had reassured Shinzo Abe that the economy was on the mend. Therefore, the second round of the VAT tax hike, an imposition which had been postponed since 2015, could go ahead in 2019. [...]
Following along the same top-down model, what unites central bankers and socialists is equality. Handing over significant authority to either results in everyone being equally impoverished. And, therefore, those very authorities fighting over minute scraps so as to display some sense of accomplishment.In October 2015, safely nested within the cozy confines of Brookings, being paid handsomely to opine on matters [...]
March 15 was when it all began to come down. Not the stock market; that had been in freefall already, beset by the rolling destruction of fire sale liquidations emanating out of the repo market (collateral side first). No matter what the Federal Reserve did or announced, there was no stopping the runaway devastation.It wasn’t until the middle of March [...]
Forward-looking data is starting to trickle in. Germany has been a main area of interest for us right from the beginning, and by beginning I mean Euro$ #4 rather than just COVID-19. What has happened to the German economy has ended up happening everywhere else, a true bellwether especially manufacturing and industry. The latest sentiment figures from ZEW as well [...]
The coronavirus began during December, but in its early stages no one knew a thing about it. It wasn’t until January 1 that health authorities in China closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after initially determining some wild animals sold there might have been the source of a pneumonia-like outbreak. On January 5, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a [...]
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