In May 2018, the European Parliament found that it was incredibly popular. Commissioning what it calls the Eurobarameter survey, the EU’s governing body said that two-thirds of Europeans inside the bloc believed that membership had benefited their own countries. It was the highest showing since 1983. Voters in May 2019 don’t appear to have agreed with last year’s survey. For [...]
Tomorrow will be one year since the global monetary system broke. Or, for the sake of accuracy, broke again this for the fourth time. There had been warnings going all the way back to September 2017 about how all was not right in the realm of reserve currency. These would take on added importance at the outset of 2018, an [...]
Scarcely a day goes by without a flood of new articles in the financial media expressing shock and disbelief over Treasury yields. It’s not just that they are wrong, these say, it’s that they have to be wrong. What they are implying just isn’t compatible with the what “everyone” is expected to believe. Consumer sentiment is still high as are [...]
We have arrived at revisions season once again. It’s that time of year when many if not most (I don’t actually keep track) of economic accounts undergo heightened scrutiny. More data is collected from more comprehensive surveys using far larger samples. These are compared to the existing high frequency panels and changes are made as necessary. Sometimes these are substantial, [...]
It is sometimes amazing what happens when you add just a little perspective. In some cases, it doesn’t require much at all to do so. One little addendum can upend the entire message, leading you off into entirely different interpretations. The implications can be enormous. To see what I mean, let’s begin with the basics. Below is what the public [...]
Preliminary estimates show that Japanese GDP surprised to the upside by a significant amount. According to Japan’s Cabinet Office, Real GDP expanded by 0.5% (seasonally-adjusted) in the first quarter of 2019 from the last quarter of 2018. That’s an annual rate of +2.1%. Most analysts had been expecting around a 0.2% contraction, which would’ve been the third quarterly minus out [...]
Maybe central bankers are just tired of being alone. In December 2008, for example, the FOMC members were practically celebrating how the NBER finally called recession an entire year after its start. Misery does love company, especially when you botch things that badly. On Tuesday, KC Fed President Esther George admitted she and her fellow policymakers were confused. But, but [...]
The Federal Reserve has been maintaining statistics on American industry for nearly as long as there has been a Federal Reserve. The first entry in the data series on Industrial Production is for the month of January ’19. Not 2019 but 1919. With over a hundred years of relatively consistent data, matching up very well with overall trends in the [...]
The Fed has its pause. The ECB is going to conduct another T-LTRO. But of all the central bank responses to the “unexpected” global weakness of late 2018, the Chinese’s was supposed to be the leader. The most forceful pushback against a worldwide downturn was reported to have been the PBOC’s “powerful” RRR cuts. China’s central bank conducted two of [...]
Before the stock market’s slide beginning in early October, for most people they heard the economy was booming, the labor market was unbelievably good, an inflationary breakout just over the horizon. Jay Powell did as much as anyone to foster this belief, chief caretaker to the narrative. He and his fellow central bankers couldn’t use the word “strong” enough. After [...]
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