If the groundhog can tell us the length of winter by simply appreciating his own shadow, China’s central bank can perform something of a similar exercise and interpretation about the global eurodollar condition. The panic response of the PBOC is to immediately peg its currency, CNY, whenever a global monetary storm of sufficient fury arrives. Thus, if the PBOC sees [...]
It was a 5% month for retail sales, the second such month this year. Overall retail sales grew by 5.3% year-over-year (NSA) in November 2016, the best growth since February. Ex autos, retail sales were up 5.1%, while retail trade expanded by 5.3%. These results, however, follow one of the weaker months of the entire data series, October, suggesting again [...]
Chinese industrial production, retail sales, and fixed asset investment were all taken as better or improving. Industrial production, for example, was 6.2% in November 2016, up from 6.1% in both September and October. Retail sales grew 10.8%, the best rate since December 2015. Fixed asset investment grew by an accumulated rate of 8.3% for the second straight month, better by [...]
There is a distinction between actual, meaningful growth and plain positive numbers. Recession everyone can agree on, as nearly every economic account (but not all) finds itself with a negative sign. Because of the binary model that the mainstream associates with all economic conditions, the absence of contraction is conflated with meaningful growth, even where the statistics are nothing like [...]
It’s easy to set aside the nostalgia, so to speak, since this is likely the last Christmas holiday season to be talked about in the media in the positively glowing terms of the unemployment rate. Ever since the “recovery” began, each and every year the internet and TV channels are filled with stories about how strong the consumer is and [...]
There were a great many ridiculous things we witnessed last year, but among them was the unshakable desire for the media and economists to label consumers and consumer spending as “strong” regardless of any other considerations. In most cases, whatever month-over-month change would seem positive, but it was so only in that very narrow view. Misunderstanding natural variation, they all [...]
A big reason why Chinese banks struggled yesterday in their daily bid for “dollars” (CNY DOWN) was the relatively unchanged economic statistics for November. Many in the media have tried to frame China’s economic situation in 2016 as if stabilizing were a positive outcome. Markets, especially funding markets, aren’t so enthused about the prospects for “weak but not getting weaker.” [...]
There are those who believe that the Chinese economy has stabilized, as if that was a good thing. Many of these people, mostly economists, said and declared much the same after 2012. That China’s economy might be in 2016 merely as bad as it was in 2015 is a highly negative development, one which requires standards for economic judgment to [...]
Retail sales in September 2016 were mixed, though what I mean by that is importantly different than what it used to suggest. Before 2012, “mixed” results in accounts like retail sales indicated that there was some good, some concerning. After last year where retail sales were uniformly atrocious, “mixed” now means some components still that way, with some others just [...]
It follows that if we find production dropping into a two-year slump, sales are likely the cause. Retail sales continue to be just as stuck as the rest of the economy, an economic limbo between growth and recession with far more of recession than growth. After suffering one of the worst months in July, retail sales bounced back in August [...]
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