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. [...]
It’s a pretty simple question, at least when asked by a member of the American citizenry not already compelled by one bias or another. Did the 2009 “stimulus” bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; or ARRA) work? The answer depends upon who you ask, including breaking down along partisan lines. To Democrat Economists, it absolutely did. For their Republican counterparts, [...]
The numbers just don’t add up. Even if you treat this stuff on the most charitable of terms, dollar for dollar, way too much of the hole almost certainly remains unfilled. That’s the thing about “stimulus” talk; for one thing, people seem to be viewing it as some kind of addition without thinking it all the way through first.You have [...]
Questioning the veracity of Chinese estimates (for anything) has always been something of an amateur sport. For a stat like real GDP, everyone “knows” that it is managed. In a complex world where an economic system for a billion and a half is incomprehensibly unpredictable, there’s really no other way to always hit your government’s mark (unless the Chinese are [...]
Chinese Industrial Production accelerated further in December 2019, rising 6.9% year-over-year according to today’s estimates from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). That was a full percentage point above consensus. IP had bottomed out right in August at a record low 4.4%, and then, just as this wave of renewed optimism swept the world, it has rebounded alongside it. Rather [...]
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