With the BLS’s release of Q4 productivity figures, we get to check the BLS’s estimates just in time for tomorrow’s increasingly irrelevant payroll report. That much has become thoroughly apparent especially since the middle of last year as the Establishment Survey and unemployment rate only diverge with the overall breadth of economic indications. With GDP no longer corroborative, the labor [...]
Factory orders declined for the fourteenth consecutive month. At -4.3%, the year-over-year drop wasn’t huge but we are now into comparing consecutive yearly contractions. In other words, factory orders in December 2015 were 4.3% less than December 2014 which were 2.4% less than December 2013. It isn’t so much the magnitude as the time now in that consistency. In seasonally-adjusted [...]
So much for the services savior? The worries about manufacturing weakness spreading are spreading. It’s maddening only because it was entirely predictable, maybe even inevitable. If consumers aren’t buying goods, and they aren’t, it is not because they are otherwise healthy (in financial terms) and have only just recently decided they have in the aggregate accumulated enough stuff. The economy [...]
FOMC Voting Member Esther George issued a vote of confidence for the economy, despite financial turmoil returning across asset markets again today. With front month WTI back under $30, her idea of a strong economy and anchored inflation expectations is still highly imperiled. She remains completely dogged, however, undeterred for further “normalization” of monetary policy largely as the US economy [...]
If China and US manufacturing are suffering from what looks like the contours of a slowly progressing recession, we don’t have to go very far to find the genesis. The common denominator is and has been US consumers. That much is evident in very clear fashion through retail sales during the Christmas season that were abysmal. The BEA’s update for [...]
The Chinese Manufacturing PMI spent most of the past four and a half years straddling just the good side of 50. In fact, it hasn’t been above 52 since early 2012 – a quite remarkable feat of low variation. This fruitlessness is somewhat emblematic of China’s dilemma; no matter what they do the industrial and manufacturing sector will not catch [...]
To an economist, the economy can bear no recession. In times of heavy central bank activity, an economy can never be in recession. Those appear to be the only dynamic factors that drive economic interpretation in the mainstream. And they become circular in the trap of just these kinds of circumstances – the economy looks like it might fall into [...]
It wasn’t in any way magnanimous for the FOMC to state clearly what everyone already knew without any need for aid of GDP calculations. The policy statement for its January 2016 meeting included language that mitigated, if not fully than significantly, the continued reliance on labor indications alone. The Fed says the labor market continues to point in the right [...]
Durable goods orders and shipments declined much worse in December than November, ending any hope that November’s variation was anything other than simply that. Across-the-board, capital goods as well as durable goods, the numbers year-over-year were nearly flat for November, thus suggesting just how bad 2015 was overall when slightly negative seems like a huge improvement. So where capital goods [...]
If the Wall Street Journal meant to reach for reassuring comfort, they fell far short. After spending late summer last year and into the fall proclaiming that manufacturing didn’t matter (12%), the newest round of talking points are “false positives.” In other words, manufacturing and industry does matter, after all, but just “not enough” to tip into full recession. That [...]
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