Shocking, perhaps, but in no way unexpected. IHS Markit didn’t just throw a wrench into all that talk about a global rebound, the organization solidly hammered a substantial nail in its coffin. According the flash estimates for February 2020, the US economy hit a skid. The manufacturing version dropped back to 50.8 from 51.9 in January. The rebound on this [...]
They put it off so long they backed themselves into this corner. The Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had originally scheduled two VAT tax hikes as part of the rollout for Abenomics. It would be inflationary and fiscally responsible all in one pass. To make sure Japan’s perpetually struggling economy could absorb any fallout from them while still [...]
Fears over machines aren’t anything new. The Terminator franchise got started in the eighties and was hardly original back then. In gross economic terms, it may seem like the robot invasion is a 21st century phenomenon. It isn’t. One need only go back to Alberta of all places and learn about the Canadian Clifford Hugh Douglas. Douglas preached something called [...]
We knew German Industrial Production for December 2019 was going to be ugly given what deStatis had reported for factory orders yesterday. In all likelihood, Germany’s industrial economy ended last year sinking and maybe too quickly. What was actually reported, however, exceeded every pessimistic guess and expectation – by a lot. IP absolutely plummeted in the final month of 2019. [...]
The repo story especially as it is told from the TIC perspective is our main emphasis currently. However, there are other odds and ends in the series that deserve some separate attention if not to the same level. The dollar system is more than collateralized lending, and this will include a few items that I’m going to point out for [...]
In the middle of 2018, Japan, they said, was riding so high. Gliding along on the tidal wave of globally synchronized growth, Haruhiko’s courage and more so patience had finally delivered the long-promised recovery. The Japanese economy had healed to a point that its central bank officials believed it time to wean the thing off decades of monetary “stimulus.” They [...]
Since I advertised the release last week, here’s Mexico’s update to Industrial Production in November 2019. The level of production was estimated to have fallen by 1.8% from November 2018. It was up marginally on a seasonally-adjusted basis from its low in October. That doesn’t sound like much, -1.8%, but apart from recent months this would’ve been the third worst [...]
I’m going to go back to Mexico for the third day in a row. First it was imports (meaning Mexico’s exports) then automobile manufacturing and now Industrial Production. I’ll probably come back to this tomorrow when INEGI updates that last number for November 2019. For now, through October will do just fine, especially in light of where automobile production is [...]
Last year’s landmine was a global affair. It wasn’t just US markets and the US economy which were so negatively impacted by it. Since it originated in the eurodollar system, the landmine (its effects) spread pretty much to all corners of the globe. Take Japan, for example. There really isn’t any (other) reason why October 2018 should show up in [...]
According to the latest TIC estimates from the Treasury Department, foreign governments continued their heavy selling of US Treasuries. During the month of October 2019, the most recent data, the official sector disposed of more than $40 billion of those securities on net. It was the third straight month of substantial declines. Some observers try to link this kind of [...]
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