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 [...]
When looking at cyclical inflections, GDP is the last to know about it. That has been the case at cyclical turns in each of the last three peaks, most especially how GDP treated the first half of the Great Recession. More recently, given the abomination of cyclical behavior, GDP finally after three years caught up with the 2012 slowdown. As [...]
With factory orders continuing to be much worse than they appear, it makes sense to try to measure the effect of over-optimism accounted by inventory. Recessions themselves were once almost exclusively set up by this one factor, as the difference between production and sales, caught up within the supply chain, eventually works out toward alignment. Companies are willing to hold [...]
For the most part, the descriptions of factory orders released this morning tend toward the seasonally-adjusted monthly variation. That is unsurprising given how much continued focus there is in just the narrowest of timeframes, leaving that as the basis for enlarging extrapolations. For June, factory orders were up 1.84% after dropping a revised 1.09% in May. That sounds hopeful and [...]
The latest FOMC policy statement was dominated by a single, added word; “some.” As far as actual policy maneuvers I doubt it will make much of a difference, but it certainly adds more flavor to the growing evidence the US economy isn’t anywhere near close to what it should have been by now. In other words, even the mainstream economic [...]
Economic reports scorecard 7/20/15 - 7/31/15 The economic data releases since my last update were a bit better than expected but as the GDP report showed, the US economy continues to plod along at a disappointing pace. In fact, the GDP report was, in my opinion, not as good as the headline with investment a particularly disappointing aspect. I would [...]
According to the latest GDP revisions I may have been off in my projection of where the recession began. I wrote in 2013 that if pressed I would name October 2012 as the start of the recession. There were many reasons for that assessment; retail sales suddenly and sharply slowing, durable goods and particularly capital goods orders contracting and a [...]
For once, the Fed gets it right. Actually, it is three times and only certain parts of the Fed, as the agency is by no means monolithic. In the first two, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow tracker nailed the preliminary GDP estimate for the second straight quarter. You can appreciate why they unveiled it just recently despite it’s existence going back [...]
I typically stay away from sentiment indicators and measures of “confidence” not just because they are of dubious construction but they often don’t mean what they are taken for. In the case of consumer confidence, you get both problems simultaneously particularly at the ends of each cycle. In other words, just as “confidence” is at its greatest point and economists, [...]
With the advance report on GDP for Q2 set to be released this week, economists are working hard to explain why it doesn’t represent the utopian delivery that they swear had already occurred via monetary intervention. There is, in immediate terms, the universal appearance of “residual seasonality” in the past few months as an almost complete revulsion to even the [...]
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