More important than the US GDP number, more substantial than the February jobs report, what will linger for longer in the public consciousness is China’s trade data. It seems as if the big drop in exports has garnered the most immediate attention, I suspect that won’t be the case moving forward. There are more important trends being captured where the [...]
The OECD has become the latest mainstream Economist outfit to relent on growth. Two years ago, they had grown cautiously optimistic as reflation appeared in the back half of 2016. By the middle of 2017, positively giddy barely able to contain their increasingly rabid excitement: The global economy is now growing at its fastest pace since 2010, with the upturn [...]
These things have typically started in global trade. This makes sense given what we are dealing with are intermittent problems in global money. Quite simply, you can’t trade if you can’t get any. Therefore, the more acute the dollar shortage the more disruptive to the global merchandise economy. The one exception to this pattern was the first. Euro$ #1 registered [...]
While Western markets breathed a sigh of relief that US GDP didn’t confirm the global slowdown, not yet, what was taking place over in Asia went in the other direction. There has been a sense, a wish perhaps, that if the global economy truly did hit a rough spot it would be limited to just the last three months of [...]
As more and more data rolls in even in this delayed fashion, the more what happened to end last year makes sense. The Census Bureau updated today its statistics for US trade in November 2018. Heading into the crucial month of December, these new figures suggest a big setback in the global economy that is almost certainly the reason markets [...]
We are starting to get a better sense of what happened to turn everything so drastically in December. Not that we hadn’t suspected while it was all taking place, but more and more in January the economic data for the last couple months of 2018 backs up the market action. These were no speculators looking to break Jay Powell, probing [...]
Just as there is gradation for positive numbers, there is color to negative ones, too. On the plus side, consistently small increments marked by the infrequent jump is never to be associated with a healthy economy let alone one that is booming. A truly booming economy is one in which the small positive numbers are rare. The recovery phase preceding [...]
The enormous setback hadn’t yet been fully appreciated in March 2012 when China’s Premiere Wen Jiabao spoke to and on behalf of the country’s Communist governing State Council. Despite it having been four years since Bear Stearns had grabbed the whole world’s attention (for reasons the whole world wouldn’t fully comprehend, specifically as to why the whole world would need [...]
There’s no sign of inflation, markets are unsettled, and now new economic data keeps confirming that dark side. Forget each month, every day there is something else suggesting a slowdown. That much had been evident across much of the global economy, but this is now different. The US has apparently been infected, too, not that that is any surprise. That’s [...]
The first central banker to blink wasn’t Jay Powell it was Stephen Poloz. The Bank of Canada has been steadily raising its policy rate like the Fed, or had been. It was widely expected that Canada’s central bank would skip this last meeting but there was no doubt about another 25 bps increase next month. Instead, things are a little [...]
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