The juxtaposition of the official unemployment rate in Japan against wage gains (losses, more precisely) raises an interesting and potentially debilitating conundrum. More workers are being employed inside Japan, but the average pay rate clearly is falling for new jobs. This, of course, sounds very familiar to Americans that have seen exactly that process play out in our versions of [...]
As much as overseas markets, particularly emerging, have come roaring back in a lot of places, there is still palpable unease in dollar allocations. That is as much expected as any kind of erosion or dysfunction will take a meandering course of ebbs and flows. But I am a little surprised at how easy the concerns of last year have [...]
There is very little that needs to be said about the April estimates for Japanese wages. The prolonged agony was extended yet again despite the purported “surge” in the Japanese economy. What the latest figures show is exactly what I suspected when the spending data first came out – that the Japanese are so pessimistic about their wage situation they [...]
The running narrative all over the developed world is temporary factors. In the US it is weather-related, while Europe is seized by not enough euphoria (more on that later), and Japan by the tax increase attempt at fiscal responsibility. In the Japanese case, as it relates to the ever-important trade balance, the record debilitation in the first quarter under an [...]
Fox Butterfield was a New York Times reporter who was famously part of the investigative team that published the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Other than that episode, however, he is primarily known for what is called the “Butterfield Effect.” The description of that eponymous affront revolves around the incorrect identification of cause and effect, usually in reverse or inverse. The [...]
What is a "widowmaker"? Merriam Webster defines it as "something dangerous to a worker's life or health". More specifically the term comes from the logging industry and describes a loose limb hanging high in a tree that falls on and kills a logger. On Wall Street for the last 25 years or so, it has had a somewhat different meaning. [...]
The surge in Japanese GDP in the first quarter has given back some cautious optimism that eroded significantly in the fourth quarter of last year. The increase in activity was not unexpected, only the degree to which it reached. Given the household spending data from earlier, this result was foreshadowed. And I think that the analysis of spending applies equally [...]
April trade data for Chinese exports purportedly show a rebound forming, though its size and even legitimacy is still much in doubt. The fake Hong Kong invoice scandal of last year is making comparisons to this year difficult, but that doesn’t and won’t quell the extrapolations. The export data are “somewhat inconsistent with the weakness seen in new export orders” [...]
March household spending in Japan surged by 7.2% Y/Y, the highest spending growth rate since 1975. That level even beat out March 1997, the month before the previous and similar tax hike. Extrapolating from that one number, there is now more hope that the Japanese economy may be able to withstand April’s tax intrusion without an economic disaster like that [...]
It was the introduction of two Latin words that doomed the modern discipline of economics. As the mathematical modeling craze swept into what is now econometrics, the derivation of theories and, more importantly, the statistical “evidence” of those theories rested upon ceteris paribus – “with other things the same.” It is difficult to accept even the basic proposition that one [...]
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