At his last news conference on June 3, ECB chief Mario Draghi issued his list of successes so far with QE in Europe. The program was only announced four and a half months ago, being operational only for two, but he was positive that it was already having its intended effects. "Our monetary policy measures have contributed to a broad-based [...]
Another contraction in US Industrial Production has extended the slump to half a year. That includes, perhaps more importantly, serious and continued erosion in capacity utilization. There were some minor upward revisions in prior months though nothing to a significant degree, leaving May IP up only 1.37% year-over-year. That is the slowest pace of the entire “recovery” period, and a [...]
While the recovery narrative received a boost from only the seasonally adjusted retail sales data this week, the rest of the domestic economy, including and especially unadjusted retail sales, is still being marked down. First, the World Bank reduced its estimates for global growth to 2.8%, meaning that the promised annual recovery is now put off yet another year. Further, [...]
For the month of June 2014, Chinese industrial production rose to 9.2%, which was the highest rate of 2014 to that point. As with the US (as if the US and Chinese economies are related), the Chinese economy in early 2014 seemed to be suffering a bit of a slow patch though there wasn’t the Polar Vortex to divide opinion. [...]
I honestly don’t know where to begin: U.S. retail sales surged in May as households boosted purchases of automobiles and a range of other goods even as they paid a bit more for gasoline, the latest sign economic growth is finally gathering steam. The Commerce Department said on Thursday retail sales increased 1.2 percent last month after an upwardly [...]
With every piece of “unexpected” weak data from China, the calls for more “stimulus” grow louder and more desperate. And still the PBOC sits on the sidelines with only minor adjustments. The latest of those has been what amounts to a muni swap, with banks eligible to pledge municipal government debt as collateral in repurchase operations, SLF’s, MLF’s and even [...]
So far this year, there has been a divergence in the housing statistics about the state of real estate markets in the US. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) estimates that existing home sales (resales) have lagged, stagnated and even faltered all the while the Census Bureau’s figures on new home sales surged. The latter moved to seven-year highs (which [...]
The latest updates for the JOLTS showed that job openings in April surged to a new series high. Jumping by 267k (seasonally adjusted), the trend in job openings is being used as confirmation that there must be some robust underlying trend in overall payrolls despite the ubiquitous slump everywhere else. In other words, this is another series from the BLS [...]
This is one of those months where you wonder what the seasonal adjustments are doing. Wholesale sales ended their three-quarter year contraction streak by rising in April, but only in the adjusted series. Because sales moved up faster than inventories there, the inventory-to-sales ratios declined somewhat off their dramatic March peak. While that sounds great, the level of wholesale sales [...]
There was a reason FDR’s administration in its first 100 days took the order it did. Contrary to some assertions, Executive Order 6102 was not a lawless expansion of executive privilege and prerogative. It had a very lawful basis, underwritten by the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 which itself was based on (and no part of this fact should be [...]
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