Why the big deal about the Fed’s new grand strategy? For one thing, as noted yesterday, there’s that whole lost decade which policymakers finally have acknowledged. They’ve quite a lot of catching up to do, but have waited for the most inopportune moment to…basically do more of the same things that hadn’t accomplished anything other than lose an entire decade.Already [...]
OK, so not all of Germany’s bellwether business sector is gaga over Christine Lagarde. The particular subset of respondents who answer the survey from that country’s ZEW, if you recall, are absolutely nuts (about “stimulus.”) Other examinations have found rather less enthusiasm; still some degree of rising optimism, but nowhere near the exuberance displayed to the ZEW.The IFO’s sentiment surveys [...]
There is simply no way to spin these figures as anything good. Not just the usual ones were talk about here, but more so some new data that you probably haven’t seen before. Beginning with the regular, it doesn’t matter that the level of initial jobless claims has declined substantially over the past few weeks. The fact of the matter [...]
We have to be somewhat careful in making too much out of statistics taken at extreme times like these. Massive moves can trigger unreliable noise in them. The second quarter of 2020 qualifies in every possible way. And the numbers it has produced are certainly extreme.Late last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued its preliminary assessment of labor [...]
I’ve always disliked the ritual of Payroll Friday because that’s what it is. The BLS doesn’t even measure the change in payrolls, for crying out loud. The government attempts to define a very wide interval into which the real labor market may have fallen. Even then it’s nothing like precision, especially at a low 90% confidence interval.And don’t get me [...]
There’s already doubt given how the two major series supposedly measuring the same thing seemingly can’t agree. If the rebound was truly robust, it would show up unambiguously everywhere. But IHS Markit’s purchasing managers indices struggled to get back above 50 in July, barely getting there, suggesting the economy might be slowing or even stalling way too close to the [...]
After raising the specter of a rebound stall, the idea before limited to Japan and Germany was abruptly given further weight today by US jobless claims numbers. For the first time since the peak at the end of March, the weekly tally of initial filings increased from the prior week. The estimate for the week of July 18, 2020, came [...]
It does sound impressive, maybe even encouraging. After two months of being shut down, industry in the US rebounded in June 2020 by the most in 60 years, and not one month during those intervening six decades was ever close. You have to go all the way back to December 1959 not just to find a larger monthly increase but [...]
One small silver lining to the current situation, while Jay Powell is busily trying to sell you his inflation fantasy, he’s actually undermining it at the very same time. No mere challenge to his own “money printing” fiction, either, the Fed’s Chairman is actively disproving the entire enterprise. While he says what he says, pay close attention instead to what [...]
Jobless claims are not a BLS statistic, which is one key reason why we might not expect perfect consistency with the major payroll reports at times. Times like these, in particular. Instead, the numbers for unemployment insurance applications and payments are tracked by the US Employment and Training Administration (both agencies fall within the Department of Labor). And if the [...]
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