It never really was weather to begin with, a statement that applies increasingly to not just this year. The fact that prior winters were wintry should have made no difference at all to an economy that is stable and moving via organic processes. It is only the artificial trends that can be subverted by all manner of inanities (inducing the [...]
With retail sales and some other recent indicators flashing deeper warnings about the current economic climate, the concerns I raised last week and before about the “bunker mentality” have increased in relevance as well as probability. Specifically, if recession on the consumer side is rightfully characterized by households taking on a “bunker mentality” then it is appropriate to suggest what [...]
For the most part, retailers have been far more cautious about inventory than their wholesale counterparts. I don’t doubt that those two processes are actually related, with the inventory appetite swinging to wholesalers almost by default, but circumstances now dictate either a conscious break with that conduct or a convergence. With inventories already far too deep on the wholesale level, [...]
It is hard to take any one-month change as anything more than usual variation when it is so far out of alignment with everything else. Some economists are cheering the fact that retail sales rose for the first time in four months, and that it was the biggest monthly gain in a year, but both of those interpretations obscure that [...]
If you go back and review the academic literature from the 1960’s up until the 1980’s as it related to monetary policy and recession, you find a rather solid foundation for credit as a means of deconstructing contractionary forces. The interface between expectations and actions had typically occurred within the realm of business credit, whereby deepening pessimism was “passed off” [...]
The wholesale sales and inventory figures were significantly revised this month going back more than a decade. The largest revisions were evident after 2007, which changes slightly the depth of the Great Recession and the “briskness” of the stunted recovery thereafter. Though both sales and inventory figures are much higher than previously believed (until they get revised again), the economic [...]
Rhetorically, I wondered yesterday what it was that economists and the media were actually looking at when opining about certain economic topics. That was in relation to German factory orders which are clearly moving in the “wrong” direction, to which that is supposed to be set aside in favor of “sentiment” and the ephemeral “confidence.” Neither of those words really [...]
The ECB having announced and then implemented at least some kind of QE plan, the entire economist community has adjusted their economic projections upward in uniform, flocking fashion. They haven’t had to make much of an adjustment because they never downgraded economic expectations much to begin with. That is why almost every news story about the economy (and not just [...]
Consumer credit is somewhat useful as a gauge for actual consumer behavior in actual activity, as opposed to consumer sentiment surveys which tend to follow stock prices (and be dominated by the upper incomes) and the theory on the “wealth effect.” In terms of the current “cycle”, or supercycle as it may be, sentiment and debt could not be further [...]
The March FOMC statement that caused a serious inflection in so many places was a reality check upon not monetary policy but economic fluency. In some ways it is subtle by design, but the changes made between the policy statement in January and that in March were more obvious and open. I have to wonder how much the then-surging “dollar” [...]
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