Factory orders gained slightly month-over-month on a seasonally-adjusted basis but collapsed in year-over-year unadjusted terms. The latter was due, only in part, to base effects of the huge surge in July last year for Boeing. Even factoring that somewhat ill-suited comparison, factory activity is still way down and, as other indications, only undergoing a slight pause in the downward trend. [...]
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 [...]
In her testimony before Congress in July, Janet Yellen laid out the same talking points that have been propagated onto Americans time and time again these past eight years. The economy is moving forward and the Fed is doing and has done everything it can, and that there are “green shoots” still though no full and mature growth. Low oil [...]
The Jackson Hole gathering may end up providing at least some clarification, but not even close to the manner in which everyone seems intent on inferring. With Janet Yellen’s notable absence, there isn’t the same sort of celebrity about what would have been the media hanging upon every word; that is, after all, what the Federal Reserve has become, not [...]
Today’s release of personal income and spending is very much related to the revised GDP figures, though I have no doubt that the BEA wishes it were not. To start with, the ongoing chain of benchmark revisions has produced an inordinately volatile set of economic accounts. That is quite against the stated purpose of all this adjusting and statistical intrusiveness; [...]
At some point, these continuous divergences between seasonally-adjusted extrapolations and unadjusted year-over-year comparisons will cease to provide so much apparent relief. Time after time, the smallest jump in the monthly variation is taken as cause for completely discarding all prior economic worries even though the more measured and consistent unadjusted growth rates continue to press downward; especially since time and [...]
Lost in all the stock market focus is the renewed disaster being signaled across credit markets, “inflation” expectations in particular. Here oil prices and the “dollar’s” darkening intersect with credit and broad financial settings. Quietly, market-based measures of the anticipated future “inflation” path have crashed. Inflation breakevens in TIPS hedging were as low yesterday as the lowest point from January [...]
Going all the way back to before last year’s Jackson Hole conclave, it was clear that there was inordinate trouble in the economy and global markets even though the central focus then was on how quickly to “normalize” everything and anything. The economy was assumed unassailably terrific and markets only reinforced that idea. The problem then, as now, was that [...]
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 [...]
To start this week, Ma Jun, chief economist for the PBOC, gave an email interview where he expressed his belief that the yuan will be more volatile but in either direction. Many still took those comments as if it were a veiled prescription toward devaluation. In the near term, it is more likely there will be "two way volatility," or [...]
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