Before there could be “globally synchronized growth”, it had been plain old “global growth.” The former from 2017 appended the term “synchronized” to its latter 2014 forerunner in order to jazz it up. And it needed the additional rhetorical flourish due to the simple fact that in 2015 for all the stated promise of “global growth” it ended up meaning [...]
A big splurge in September, and then not much more in October. While it would be consistent for many to focus on the former, instead there is much about the latter which, for once, is feeding growing concerns. Retail sales, American consumer spending on goods, has been the one (outside of economically insignificant housing) bright spot since summer. If it [...]
It was a shock, total disbelief given how everyone, and I mean everyone, had penciled China in as the world’s go-to growth engine. If the global economy was ever going to get off the ground again following GFC1 more than a half a decade before, the Chinese had to get back to their precrisis “normal.” In 2014, the clock was [...]
It does seem, at first, a huge contradiction. On the one hand, what we know so far of China’s 14th 5-year plan apparently will lean heavily on new technologies not-yet invented to rescue the country’s economy from the pit of de-globalization the eurodollar system had thrown it into years ago. If the global economy isn’t going to recover, and there’s [...]
The Federal Reserve is the current contender for taking the crown from the Japanese. Central bankers, in particular, are like hoarders; they never throw any policy idea away. It doesn’t matter how many times it fails, or how spectacularly. Japanese policymakers have stuck with QE for now double-digit attempts without anything to show for it. Instead, whichever thing gets rebranded. [...]
OK, that’s more like it. Finally. American consumers absolutely splurged last month. According the Census Bureau, retail sales last month spiked by nearly 2% (seasonally-adjusted) from August, an unusually big monthly increase. This surge in spending during September 2020 sent the unadjusted total up by just more than 7% from September 2019. How good is that? Setting aside the statistics [...]
With all these warning signs pointing squarely back to the middle or end of July, it’s pretty clear that “something” changed the momentum maybe even direction of the economy’s reopening rebound. There’s also no question about what one key part of what might have been responsible, thus the quotation marks surrounding the word “something.”The federal government had been handing out [...]
One day short of one year ago, on September 16, 2019, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported its updated monthly estimates for the Big 3 accounts. Industrial Production (IP) is a closely-watched indicator as it is relatively decent proxy for the entire goods economy around the world. Retail Sales in the post-Euro$ #2 context give us a sense of [...]
Forget scripted television. If you want Game of Thrones-style palace intrigue, you can do no better than Beijing in 2020. There are all sorts of rumors floating around, few of which can ever get confirmed. It’s not that there are rumors but rather how many of them, and how they don’t seem to be stamped out with the usual regularity [...]
Imagine you are locked in your home and can only go outside of it to purchase the bare necessities (this would’ve sounded ridiculous in every year before 2019). For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that you normally spend $100 every month, half of that on the basics. Thus, for the month preceding this lockdown you’d have laid out the full hundred [...]
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