It’s not recession fears, those are in the past. For much if not most (vast majority) of mainstream pundits and newsmedia alike, unlike regular folks this is all news to them (the irony, huh?) Economists and central bankers everywhere had said last year was a boom, a true inflationary inferno raging worldwide. For once, CPIs (or European HICPs) seemed to [...]
We always have to keep in mind that the major economic accounts perform poorly during inflections. Europe in early 2018, for example, was supposed to have been just booming only to have run right into the brick wall that was Euro$ #4. Statistics like Real GDP picked up the downshift, but didn’t quite nail the degree to which the European [...]
German optimism was predictably, inevitably sent crashing in March and April 2022. According to that country’s ZEW survey, an uptick in general optimism from November 2021 to February 2022 collided with the reality of Russian armored vehicles trying to snake their way down to Kiev. Whereas sentiment had rebounded from an October low of 22.3, blamed on whichever of the [...]
It was likely inevitable, broad economic commentary sifting into the laundry yet again. With alarming regularity, every couple of years the idea and the term “decoupling” rears its filthy head as major global economies seem to diverge. They don’t, though, merely an illusion, a trick due mostly to differences in timing.It was Mohamed El-Erian of PIMCO all the way back [...]
If markets seem a bit on edge, I guess omicron seems a good reason if for no other reason than we don’t know much about it. But even that reaction points toward something else. A truly robust economy has little to fear from such unknowns, even from what might be predictable overreaction across the entire public sphere.The knee-jerk negative sentiment [...]
Forgotten now, overridden by the arrival of the coronavirus, Germany’s economy was already well into recession before COVID. Quite a long time before. It wasn’t an earth-shattering collapse reaching downward to an incredible depth, that became the later effect of overreacting to the pandemic. We will simply never know what that prior contraction would have looked like, and how bad [...]
By the summer of 2018, there were already any number of economic warning signs over globally synchronized growth fading fast. Many if not most of them market-based, of course, but not all. In the realm of sentiment, for example, the Germans in particular had put their finger on the pulse of the global economy and found it suspiciously feeble, economic [...]
At great risk of upsetting China’s army of censors, I’m going to “slander” the Chinese economy anyway. Were I a comrade within that particular nation, I’d now get labeled a “black mouth” spreading misinformation in the form of actual up-to-date data published by the same Communist government fearing its spread. Rate of change in the economy goes down, rate of [...]
The recovery, or reflation, was sort of sailing along until suddenly it wasn’t. At least that was the impression anyone would’ve gotten from pretty much every mainstream source. The reality of the (global) economy’s rebound from last year’s recession was a touch more nuanced, having actually struggled quite a lot between Uncle Sam’s Helicopter #1 and #2; the hadn’t begun [...]
It was very cold across much of the United States in February in parts of it that usually don’t freeze up – literally and figuratively. While electricity in Texas garnered most of the attention, the weather was just as bad in many other states across the typically mild wintering South. Undoubtedly, last month was an exception to the seasons’ status [...]
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