The question was never about what Chinese GDP would amount to, as that is as much an intentional projection as it is a measure of economic performance. That is true everywhere, but the Chinese have become masters of hitting their marks. They “predicted” 7% GDP and that is exactly what they got. It is more difficult, however, to do the [...]
For the most part, retailers have been far more cautious about inventory than their wholesale counterparts. I don’t doubt that those two processes are actually related, with the inventory appetite swinging to wholesalers almost by default, but circumstances now dictate either a conscious break with that conduct or a convergence. With inventories already far too deep on the wholesale level, [...]
It is hard to take any one-month change as anything more than usual variation when it is so far out of alignment with everything else. Some economists are cheering the fact that retail sales rose for the first time in four months, and that it was the biggest monthly gain in a year, but both of those interpretations obscure that [...]
None of the following is unexpected given the “unexpected” nature of retail sales contradicting everything that was expected. Consumers are not acting like they “should” as the unemployment rate describes its version of the economy. From Bloomberg: Purchases unexpectedly dropped 0.6 percent, a third consecutive decline, Commerce Department figures showed Thursday in Washington. The median forecast of 86 economists surveyed [...]
We know that credit and funding markets took a nasty turn in December, but it wasn’t until economic data released just recently that we gained a better appreciation about why that might have been. In the relative blindness of “realtime” such market-driven bearishness could be self-contained within purely financial factors alone, and thus opens the possibility of ambiguity about why the [...]
China remains an export economy no matter how hard they try to convince the world they are moving otherwise. The idea of creating internal “demand” as a means to extricate marginal changes from everybody else is undoubtedly a good idea, even a noble one, but the reality of China as it exists top-down isn’t conducive for such a transformation. Further, [...]
Janet Yellen’s testimony concluded, no one gets any more clarity about what the FOMC actually thinks. However, that itself is in one sense an indication as she vacillated a little too much about making a firm commitment to either the recovery or “transitory” oil prices. QE3 ended months ago and we are seven years into this thing already, but there [...]
I have to hand it to the good work done by Gallup, as their tracking polls have “previewed” the “official” retail sales reports these past few months. Gallup found another Polar Vortex-like hole in consumer spending and sure enough the Census Bureau confirmed as much. It is decidedly ugly and can do nothing but put a major dent in the [...]
The problem with a high rate of inventory build is that it eventually has to go somewhere. In an actual economic “boom” that isn’t much of a concern as businesses remain relatively confident that even if inventory is high in one month it will be easily disposed, profitably, in the next. That is the dominant narrative that seems to be [...]
There wasn’t anything out of China that would explain, even partially, the big hit to copper today. Every commentator tasked with offering an opinion has linked copper to China and only China, yet the only economic news of note today was retail sales in the US. The World Bank did its part by cutting growth expectations largely on Asia and [...]
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