Household spending in February 2016 in Japan rose year-over-year for the first time in six months. That was the sum total of any good economic news for the monetary-stricken economy, and it doesn’t really survive closer inspection. The rise in spending was due largely to “other” activities you don’t associate with strong economic rebounds. The overall figure was just +1.6% [...]
According to Discern Investment Analytics, the number of retail store closings in the first two months of 2016 was about a third more than the closings in the same two months last year. That’s bad news just in terms of the raw increase, but more so given that there was a wave of shutting retailer outlets last year, too. Store [...]
It is increasingly difficult to account for the estimates provided by various statistical agencies when there is no consistency not just with other non-governmental series but within each. The latest retail sales report has nothing in common with anything including itself. The mess features major revisions for the prior two months that simply leave the calendar as demarcation. Unadjusted retail [...]
Industrial production for the combined January/February period in China fell to just 5.4%, matching the lowest growth rate of the past fourteen years. Only the January/February 2002 IP rate was lower, but that was a single data point giving way to the rising financialization of the late eurodollar period. In 2016, these decelerations are commonplace, determined, and have no end [...]
Revolving consumer credit turned upward in March last year, which signaled to economists that the true end of the Great Recession was at hand. The largest impediment to the monetary version of the recovery was the “debt hangover” from the mortgage surge during the housing mania. Consumers, rightfully cautious after that disastrous experience, spent the early years of the “recovery” [...]
The fiscal year for retailers ended in January with nothing like what it was supposed to be. Still, as always, the suggestions remained that a rebound in consumerism would be before too long. If it wasn’t to be evident right away in February, the start of the 2016 fiscal year was at least supposed to be back in the plus [...]
Going only from the conventional interpretation of the optimistic 242,000 in payroll gains Friday, it is still remarkable how more than one-fifth of those purported job creations in February were due to activity in retail trade alone. The monthly variation estimate for the retail sector (not including wholesale or transportation of goods) was an especially robust +55k even though the [...]
When Janet Yellen testified to Congress last week, she was as usual careful with her words. Alan Greenspan once called it “mumbling with incoherence” but there is very little left to rambling in Yellen’s predicament. Where Greenspan was once the “maestro” and Bernanke the “hero” Yellen is stuck holding the bag, and I think she knows it. In truth, there [...]
The January retail sales report demonstrates perfectly the nature of this whole recovery, but especially the last year or so when everything holding to the primary narrative boils down to the unemployment rate – a statistic that is more and more determined by peculiar assumptions and calculations. The advance release from the Census Bureau had enough positive vigor to provide [...]
Despite continued cuts in production and supply chain activity, inventory through November persists in great imbalance. With December retail sales demonstrating a Christmas sales season only worse in 2008 and 2009, that isn’t like to have changed. It’s not as if manufacturers and imports have been robust to build that much inventory; production is already in clear recession. The only [...]
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