If you limited yourself to only the official unemployment rate the picture you get of the economy is seemingly one that fits very much inside historical expectations. The rate rose and fell just like it “should” in a recession/recovery cycle. That raises the question about why this period has been so divergent with past expectations. When even the Federal Reserve [...]
Despite any intent, the revisions to wages and real incomes that I highlighted yesterday actually go a long way toward providing an explanation for other “aberrations” that still exist. The primary problem I have with accepting the mainstream version of economic events, particularly that of the Establishment Survey, is that the labor force is still shrinking, or at least barely [...]
The ECB’s experimentation with negative nominal interest rates is exactly that – an experiment whose range of conclusions spans the full spectrum of possibilities. I have absolutely no doubt at all that they have done enough regression calculations and monte carlo simulations to have estimated “central tendencies”, but at the same time I highly doubt recent developments fell within them. [...]
Personal intuition usually serves well in both economics and finance, which is why, despite all the billions of dollars and amazing efforts otherwise, this business is still an art and not a “science” (even pseudo-). I should have remembered as such the last time I actually reported on a sentiment survey, as the Chicago PMI a few months back tumbled [...]
Last week was pretty much a disaster, not just economically speaking, for a wide swath of the globe – from Japan’s ongoing "unexpected" collapse to Europe’s "unexpected" third go at contraction (without recovery) to a very dim and "unexpected" view of credit markets pretty much everywhere including the US. This week started out with more grimness, in places like China [...]
What should most troubling to investors of all stripes and locales is that what is going on in Europe is almost exactly the same as what is taking place in Japan. Despite nearly all outward appearances, Japan and Europe have far more in common than differences, at least where it counts. The Japanese have finally created the monster they sought, [...]
The Bank of Japan has already been pressured by events to reduce its economic expectations for 2014. At the end of 2013 there was enough cautious optimism that Japanese officials went ahead with their dubious proposal to try to appear fiscally responsible. The tax increase was expected to create a mild contraction in GDP before the economy then accelerated mildly [...]
Following up on my earlier observations about a reduced trajectory, getting away from the thick trees of quarterly statistic movements and revision for the forest of patterns and paths, viewing the subcomponents of GDP as standalone accounts rather than contributors highlights exactly that problem. Whether you view the economy through real final sales (both of domestic product and to domestic [...]
Statistics are notorious for being worse than liars, according to cliché, but under many circumstances there is more than an element of truth to that. The latest revisions to the July revisions are not quite the liars’ paradox (everything I say is a lie; that first statement is true) but there is something amiss that is missed in the narrow [...]
Factoring the record pace of Boeing’s distortions on durable goods, the series has picked up in the past two months after major and large upward revisions to June’s estimates. The increase in growth encompasses nearly all of the subsegments, as new orders and shipments for both durable goods (ex transportation) and nondefense capital goods (ex aircraft) increased measurably over July [...]
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