According to the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, the PCE Deflator, consumer price pressures remained muted in January 2021. No surprise, given the absence of inflationary conditions contained within the prior released CPI report for the same month, as even the contribution from surging oil prices was noticeably minimal in both. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) today said that [...]
Is there a charmed fiscal number that unlocks the inflationary promised-land? Central bank Economists have spent more than a decade in the West, two in Japan, desperately seeking the magic number QE. Though their own research is substantial and conclusive that LSAP’s like QE don’t work, and never have, officials conclude instead that it always comes up short because it [...]
If you remember 2018’s economic “boom”, you’ll likely recall that year’s second quarter. Set up by December 2017’s Tax Cut and Jobs Act, when the BEA published GDP estimates for those three months that July, the unusual 4% growth rate seemed to have confirmed the positive effects of tax reform “stimulus” funded by a substantial increase in the fiscal deficit. [...]
The oil market has caught a mild case of the raging disease. Not COVID, rather the purported cure for it. Vaccine-phoria has visited the energy sector and propelled oil prices upward while pulling less contango in the futures curve, awakening this commodity market from its post-August doldrums. It had been that detour in WTI which began to suggest this summer [...]
Survivor’s euphoria, but then what? Reopening momentum, though would that be enough on its own? More of a concern, the uptrend was heavily infused by government intervention. How much was organic, how much wastefully artificial (in the sense of “stimulus”; as economic aid, it was necessary)? So many questions, so much to try and sort out as we enter the [...]
Entering 2020, before overreactions to COVID and the shutdown they brought, private income derived from all sources had slowed to the lowest rate since 2010 (not counting 2013, that year skewed by tax changes which were implemented finishing up 2012). According to the latest annual revisions for it, last year, 2019, was a bit more recessionary than previously thought especially [...]
If that wasn’t the most anticlimactic worst economic quarter in history. The numbers were just as bad as people were expecting – which is the point. It’s not like this economic collapse snuck up on anyone, nor did its scale and depth. We’ve all known from the very beginning what the deal was going to be. Headline real GDP fell [...]
The payroll report for May was a shock because it came in as a plus when analysts, whomever they are, were expecting another huge minus. It seemed to set the tone for a realistic pathway being made out in the shape of the most perfect “V” ever written down. The mistake, such that there has been one, was interpreting the [...]
The missing piece so far is consumers. We’ve gotten a glimpse at how businesses are taking in the shock, both shocks, actually, in that corporations are battening down the liquidity hatches at all possible speed and excess. Not a good sign, especially as it provides some insight into why jobless claims (as the only employment data we have for beyond [...]
March 15 was when it all began to come down. Not the stock market; that had been in freefall already, beset by the rolling destruction of fire sale liquidations emanating out of the repo market (collateral side first). No matter what the Federal Reserve did or announced, there was no stopping the runaway devastation.It wasn’t until the middle of March [...]
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