Brazil’s Minister of Economy Paulo Geudes told members of the local press last month that the country was on track to lose about 300,000 “formal” jobs in 2020. Though employment growth has slowed there in the second half of the year, as it has worldwide, Geudes was quite proud of his achievement. After all, though hundreds of thousands of Brazilians [...]
A big splurge in September, and then not much more in October. While it would be consistent for many to focus on the former, instead there is much about the latter which, for once, is feeding growing concerns. Retail sales, American consumer spending on goods, has been the one (outside of economically insignificant housing) bright spot since summer. If it [...]
It was a shock, total disbelief given how everyone, and I mean everyone, had penciled China in as the world’s go-to growth engine. If the global economy was ever going to get off the ground again following GFC1 more than a half a decade before, the Chinese had to get back to their precrisis “normal.” In 2014, the clock was [...]
It does seem, at first, a huge contradiction. On the one hand, what we know so far of China’s 14th 5-year plan apparently will lean heavily on new technologies not-yet invented to rescue the country’s economy from the pit of de-globalization the eurodollar system had thrown it into years ago. If the global economy isn’t going to recover, and there’s [...]
They should be drooling over the prospects of a clearing path toward normality. The pain and disaster of 2020’s economic hole receding into a more pleasant 2021 which would have been in position to conceivably pay it all back before any long run damage. Getting back to just even with February instead is becoming a distant probability, the kind of [...]
Their experience with COVID has been different in each case. Their response to the outbreak and pandemic hardly uniform. Mexico, for example, has reported 855,000 cases of the coronavirus from which more than 86,000 have died (or were found to have the disease when they died). Japan, on the other hand, just 93,000 cases with only 1,600 fatalities. We all [...]
The Federal Reserve is the current contender for taking the crown from the Japanese. Central bankers, in particular, are like hoarders; they never throw any policy idea away. It doesn’t matter how many times it fails, or how spectacularly. Japanese policymakers have stuck with QE for now double-digit attempts without anything to show for it. Instead, whichever thing gets rebranded. [...]
OK, that’s more like it. Finally. American consumers absolutely splurged last month. According the Census Bureau, retail sales last month spiked by nearly 2% (seasonally-adjusted) from August, an unusually big monthly increase. This surge in spending during September 2020 sent the unadjusted total up by just more than 7% from September 2019. How good is that? Setting aside the statistics [...]
Because it worked out so well for Jay Powell? No. They have no idea what to do now. Zero. And they are out of ideas. I’m writing about the ECB here, but it begins first with the Federal Reserve Flustered by years of a very low unemployment rate stuck several points below where “full employment” had been estimated as late [...]
The original “V” narrative was simple and straightforward. The economy was turned off by governments prioritizing modeled simulations of something like the Black Death, but it would be easy enough to turn it right back on especially with the aid of so much “stimulus” being added in every possible way. Monetary, fiscal, you name it.Piece of cake. Legitimizing the choice [...]
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