While the recovery narrative received a boost from only the seasonally adjusted retail sales data this week, the rest of the domestic economy, including and especially unadjusted retail sales, is still being marked down. First, the World Bank reduced its estimates for global growth to 2.8%, meaning that the promised annual recovery is now put off yet another year. Further, [...]
For the month of June 2014, Chinese industrial production rose to 9.2%, which was the highest rate of 2014 to that point. As with the US (as if the US and Chinese economies are related), the Chinese economy in early 2014 seemed to be suffering a bit of a slow patch though there wasn’t the Polar Vortex to divide opinion. [...]
I honestly don’t know where to begin: U.S. retail sales surged in May as households boosted purchases of automobiles and a range of other goods even as they paid a bit more for gasoline, the latest sign economic growth is finally gathering steam. The Commerce Department said on Thursday retail sales increased 1.2 percent last month after an upwardly [...]
It is exceedingly difficult these days to detect where finance ends and the economy begins. That was intended, of course, as it was believed that greater intrusiveness on the part of the financial ends were consistent with greater, and better, economic control. Certain strains of economics have been obsessed since the dawn of the discipline with finding “optimal” outcomes. More [...]
It makes a very interesting contrast, to start the week under cloud of suspicion only to end it with its reverse. Economic data was routinely awful earlier, though for the most part financial markets are moved more by how that might make Janet Yellen feel than anything of a fundamental basis for all those prices. Typically, the ISM surveys are [...]
The fact that these deficient economic estimates continue in April instead of the forecasted and pleaded rebound has raised more serious concerns even among those most loyal to the mainline tendencies. It is getting more difficult to deny that there is a major economic problem brewing, one which may already be rather severe despite the fact that the heaviest pressures [...]
If March was supposed to herald at least the beginning of the anticipated yearly rebound, April put that idea to rest. In terms of retail sales, one of the most important and largest segments of “demand”, April’s figures were mostly the worst of the recovery and some of the worst in the entire series – “beating” out February in every [...]
Along with this morning’s atrocious retail sales report comes more bad news for economic statistics that have been at least clinging to the recovery narrative. My biggest complaint with the Establishment Survey is that I believe the BLS in constructing their measure of variability has been overly optimistic in its trend-cycle component. In the 1960’s and especially the 1970’s, economic [...]
Japan continues to provide the best refutation of monetary policy as anything other than destructive. With its economy stripped bare of dynamic essentials after thirty years of the Bank of Japan’s “lead”, marginal changes are left as remnants of nothing more than monetary transmission. In the space of QQE, that has used up and destroyed what was left of Japan’s [...]
I think we are getting an even better sense of what might be the most ironclad law of orthodox economics. It seems as if there is a nonlinear proportionality between the desperation in which the mainstream denies it and the farther away from recovery the economy becomes. Last year was full of denial, especially as it related to that “anomaly” [...]
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