The Federal Reserve left interest rates at 0 after their 2 day policy meeting this week. Less concerning, they lowered the forecast for future rates. We have red and green street lights. Why? Because society finds it beneficial that people using our streets aren't speeding through an intersection from both directions at the same time. We have laws against stealing. Why? [...]
When the difference between your rhetoric and your actions is wide, inconsistency is pretty much axiomatic. However, Janet Yellen’s press conference was much more than that. I understand it’s a lot to charge blatant dishonesty, but almost everything she said is cow manure. And I make that assertion not on my own reading of the situation, but on hers. The [...]
If we are being honest and using words as they exactly mean, the recovery actually ended in 2012. My sense of dating would mark that as March 2012 since so many various data series held that month for what has been a durable inflection. It was true not just here in the US, but across the globe as 2012 was [...]
When I wrote on Friday that I was encouraged for the first time in years over the combined rise of Trump and Sanders I meant nothing by way of suggesting either as an actual candidate or what they might do should they pull it out. If anything, I implied that the political situation might have to follow the economy; that [...]
The IMF added its voice last week to the chorus of Keynesians calling for Janet Yellen to - to paraphrase Rocky Horror - can it, Janet. The "it" being, of course, a hike in interest rates. The IMF cited "substantial output gaps" and "below target inflation" to justify their call for monetary policy to remain "accommodative". I have no idea [...]
In her testimony before Congress in July, Janet Yellen laid out the same talking points that have been propagated onto Americans time and time again these past eight years. The economy is moving forward and the Fed is doing and has done everything it can, and that there are “green shoots” still though no full and mature growth. Low oil [...]
To illustrate just how badly Monday’s selloff (and yesterday’s late day reversal) seems to have shaken core confidence in the overriding narrative (ALL IS WELL!) you need only view the drastic reversal on what stock prices supposedly mean. With QE’s producing little or no tangible economic benefit, certainly nothing specific with which its proponents can easily point to, they have [...]
Lost in all the stock market focus is the renewed disaster being signaled across credit markets, “inflation” expectations in particular. Here oil prices and the “dollar’s” darkening intersect with credit and broad financial settings. Quietly, market-based measures of the anticipated future “inflation” path have crashed. Inflation breakevens in TIPS hedging were as low yesterday as the lowest point from January [...]
Looking back now, January was such a weird month. You had, on the one hand, the barely restrained giddiness of the mainstream media proclaiming ultimate success of 5% GDP and an Establishment Survey (and dutiful unemployment rate) that could do nothing wrong. To this view, the economy was a certainty. Yet, on the other hand, markets around the world were [...]
The monthly payroll report needs to be rebranded the monthly labor force report. By far, the most accurate measure of the series continues to be the apathy of Americans not currently working or looking toward purportedly massive employment expansion. Those two positions are not only inconsistent, they are by all intuitive sense mutually exclusive. No less orthodoxy than Janet Yellen [...]
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