What should be written about GDP has nothing to do with whether 1.5% is meaningfully different than 3.9%. Everything gets focused upon the quarterly variations and, often intentionally, loses all that is important about the economic context. That 1.5% is weak and ineffectual, but that it continues the string of irregular and unstable approximations is all that truly matters; especially [...]
Most people would look at a 40-month deviation as being rationally altering, maybe even something so permanent. The Fed, on the other hand, along with economists, have convinced themselves that somehow three and a half years is but a temporary detour. And so monetary policy and the recovery outlook itself are supposed to somehow straddle that inconvenience while still emitting [...]
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 [...]
Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the end of the eurodollar standard as a functioning system. Though the attainment of such dizzying scale was completely artificial, finance unbacked by real economy, it at least to that date had remained in more than superficial order. Reviewing the systemic break of that day remains quite useful in understanding where we are now, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The old cliché is that everything of significance in life is a marathon rather than a sprint. In Japan, such sentiment strains all reason as there is no way that any marathon, economic or otherwise, could possibly be expected to last more twenty-five years. But here it is in 2015, thirty years after the Plaza Accord and BoJ’s first massive [...]
The entire suite of global asset bubbles is predicated on nothing more than promises. It is widely acknowledged, even among those doing the most promising, that so far this “cycle” has been substandard in every way imaginable and at every turn. Yet, for all that continued disappointment, the fact that there was marginal positive numbers remains as the basis for [...]
Japanese household spending increased 5.5% in nominal terms in May; 4.8% in real spending growth. That was the first monthly increase since November and since it was a positive number, and not as typically close to zero, it is being hailed as another great sign of QQE success. With Q1 GDP revised up to nearly 5%, economists are back to [...]
In looking through the CBO’s litany of economic projections, past and present, I wrote yesterday that the major economic problem started to become clear by what was missing. The main orthodox models all view economic potential in much the same fashion, as if the economy exists completely upon a curve of inflation and employment, whereby the intersection of those two [...]
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