For Episode 74.0 of Eurodollar University’s Making Sense, Emil and I were incredibly honored and thrilled to have been able to bring on Allison Fedirka from Geopolitical Futures, the outfit of George Friedman fame. Specifically, we were interested in her specialty which is Latin America because after China that’s where you want to go next to understand how developments money [...]
The number illusion is a logical fallacy of sorts, an appeal to the authority of what looks like objectivity. You can’t argue with math. While that’s true, in social sciences there is the continued absence of real proofs which dominate the hard sciences. Newtonian physics works as a worldview because the numbers throughout history have always checked out.When an Economist [...]
At the monthly press conference China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) now regularly gives whenever the Big Three economic accounts are updated (this time along with quarterly GDP), spokesman Liu Aihua was asked by a reporter from Reuters to comment on how the global economic recession might impact the Communist government’s long range goal of reaching its assigned GDP target. [...]
The economic sickness is predictably spreading. While unexpected in most of the world which still, somehow, depends on central banking forecasts, it really has been almost inevitable. From the very start, just the utterance of the word “decoupling” was the kiss of death. What that meant in the context of globally synchronized growth, 2017’s repeatedly dominant narrative, wasn’t the end [...]
The Netherlands is the latest in Europe to move away from the center. A relatively new political party in Holland, formed in 2016 it stunned convention this week. Dutch voters were electing provincial parliamentary representatives who then determine seats in the country’s Senate. The Forum for Democracy (FfD) party will go from two to twelve campaigning on a “Dutch first” [...]
Amazon made a huge splash when it announced it was raising wages. On the surface, it appeared to confirm all those stories about a massive, nationwide labor shortage. In addition, it positioned Amazon in the “fight for fifteen”, a political topic which raises more questions than provides answers. It was the rare occasion where populists on both sides applauded the [...]
The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC) was established a long time ago in the maelstrom of World War II budgetary as well as wartime conflagration. That made sense. To fight all over the world, the government required creative help in figuring out how to sell an amount of bonds it hadn’t needed (in proportional terms) since the Civil War. A [...]
In October, YouGov partnered with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to conduct the latter’s annual poll on US attitudes towards socialism. There was, as usual, some good and bad news contained within the results. The number of overall Americans who believe communism was and is still a problem, for example, rose 5 points to 75%. The bad news is [...]
The Jackson Hole gathering may end up providing at least some clarification, but not even close to the manner in which everyone seems intent on inferring. With Janet Yellen’s notable absence, there isn’t the same sort of celebrity about what would have been the media hanging upon every word; that is, after all, what the Federal Reserve has become, not [...]
The oft-leveled charge against politicians in DC is that they are “out of touch.” Such desultory description is often deserved, however, so it isn’t really cliché so much as connecting republican (small “r”) values through time. In the case of the 2015 economy, however, the idea that the economists sitting on the FOMC board (and their academic statisticians) aren’t in [...]
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