Spending and wage growth disappointed in September, particularly as incomes continue to register barely any growth. The fact that this stagnation has continued for several years allows commentary such as this: U.S. consumer spending in September recorded its smallest gain in eight months as income barely rose, suggesting some cooling in domestic demand after recent hefty increases. The Commerce [...]
If central banks are now almost exclusively on the defensive, we have no shortage of anecdotes and data to explain it. For a good long while economists and commentary managed to keep the US safely “decoupled” from the “overseas” maelstrom, but the deluge locally has become far too much to ignore. This is far, far deeper than just some indistinct [...]
The problem with using GDP as the primary means of economic accounting is its very nature. By attempting both comprehensiveness and precision, the resulting calculation is an agglomeration of various methods and sources, many of which are quite dynamic apart from static regressions. By that construction alone, GDP is susceptible to high degrees of kurtosis where assumptions find little. In [...]
The estimates for home construction in May were pretty much as expected except for one single data point. The calculation for new permits in the multi-family segment jumped by 53.5% year-over-year, completely out of character with everything else. Given that fact, it seems far more likely that the permits estimate is an outlier or artifact of even expected variation. That [...]
One more point for Payroll Friday: we have the productivity problem and the spending problem but there is also the wage problem. Despite what the raw, quantitative count of jobs is in the main surveys there are no wage gains associated with them. That is itself highly curious as wages overall have been locked into a narrow range since the [...]
With the lunacy of “payroll Friday” on full display, it isn’t much of a surprise to get overwhelmed by commentary that totally upends what investing used to be. There once was a mythical relationship that spanned and nurtured between stocks and the real economy. The former was representative about what to expect in the latter, and the latter benefited from [...]
The monthly PCE and income figures that were released this week were already incorporated into the advance estimate for Q1 GDP. Given that March wasn’t as bad as it could have been, and that PCE within the GDP report was, that kind of gives you a sense for the serious deterioration in the US consumer; “unexpectedly.” If there is a [...]
Japan continues to provide the best refutation of monetary policy as anything other than destructive. With its economy stripped bare of dynamic essentials after thirty years of the Bank of Japan’s “lead”, marginal changes are left as remnants of nothing more than monetary transmission. In the space of QQE, that has used up and destroyed what was left of Japan’s [...]
With retail sales and some other recent indicators flashing deeper warnings about the current economic climate, the concerns I raised last week and before about the “bunker mentality” have increased in relevance as well as probability. Specifically, if recession on the consumer side is rightfully characterized by households taking on a “bunker mentality” then it is appropriate to suggest what [...]
We know that credit and funding markets took a nasty turn in December, but it wasn’t until economic data released just recently that we gained a better appreciation about why that might have been. In the relative blindness of “realtime” such market-driven bearishness could be self-contained within purely financial factors alone, and thus opens the possibility of ambiguity about why the [...]
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