I don’t think Mario Draghi panicked, but China is as good a scapegoat as any at the moment. The ECB’s intended adjustment in the PSPP (QE) is cosmetic, but then again QE itself is pretty much only that to begin with. It seems pretty obvious given the desperate lack of any positive impact from it so far, and the very [...]
The re-crash of oil prices during the recent “dollar” wave/run were hard on almost everyone involved, economically and otherwise, but perhaps not more so than the ECB and its QE proponents. Despite being attributed with every minor upward move that could plausibly be assigned, for all the hype there has been very little actual movement anywhere of significance. The virtuous [...]
Today was, apparently, the perfect storm of downbeat PMI’s. As usual, sentiment surveys have limited value except in cases of outliers or in unanimity. There was some of both across the world’s manufacturing updates. First, which was certainly most watched, China’s PMI fell to a three-year low below 50, further suggesting that there isn’t yet a bottom for how much [...]
To illustrate just how badly Monday’s selloff (and yesterday’s late day reversal) seems to have shaken core confidence in the overriding narrative (ALL IS WELL!) you need only view the drastic reversal on what stock prices supposedly mean. With QE’s producing little or no tangible economic benefit, certainly nothing specific with which its proponents can easily point to, they have [...]
Let’s start by stipulating that the ECB’s operations are far more complex. This is the case both in terms of actual operations but also in trying to figure out what goes where and why. That is at the start unsurprising given the European monetary framework; even though the euro as a denomination is continental there are still national fissures in [...]
Looking back now, January was such a weird month. You had, on the one hand, the barely restrained giddiness of the mainstream media proclaiming ultimate success of 5% GDP and an Establishment Survey (and dutiful unemployment rate) that could do nothing wrong. To this view, the economy was a certainty. Yet, on the other hand, markets around the world were [...]
In another of the innumerable cosmic coincidences that so abound these days, producer prices in China have been in “deflation” since March 2012. Not only is that 41 consecutive months of falling prices (insofar as this index captures that effect), that month is ubiquitous as a trend demarcation in so many other places. It’s as if the Chinese economy and [...]
Given the outward expression of the “dollar” in various proxies, it is not surprising to see the inward development continue in the same pattern. Interbank rates and estimates are in many cases surging, particularly in the second half of July which matches the acceleration in the outward projections. This direction is nearly uniform, which confirms that the latest “dollar” problems [...]
China’s economy is sliding and nobody can really tell where that downturn will end (though it doesn’t stop the media from proclaiming a bottom at each individual upward variation). Brazil’s economy is in the worst shape in decades, with both volume problems coinciding with the real’s sharp devaluation hammering consumer prices. The country’s central bank has managed to make it [...]
There was absolutely nothing good about the most recent trade data for June. Even what looked like an improvement really wasn’t, suggesting, strongly, that conditions in the global economy are still declining. With Canada falling to recession, blaming a “puzzling” and sharp decline in non-petroleum exports (the US as that nation’s biggest customer), the decline in US import “demand” completing [...]
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