The problem with global growth, synchronized or not, is that it isn’t really a thing. It is a made-up concept that accompanies confusion. Why is the economy about to pick up when there is no evidence for that expectation? Global growth. It’s a nonspecific bogeyman that anyone can point to and expect little or often no pushback. It’s nothing more [...]
January was the last month in which China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) specifically mentioned Fixed Asset Investment (FAI) of state holding enterprises (or SOE’s). For the month of December 2017, the NBS reported accumulated growth (meaning for all of 2017) in this channel of 10.1%. Through FAI of SOE’s, Chinese authorities in early 2016 had panicked themselves into unleashing [...]
Even after several years of them, monetary policymakers continued to tread carefully with large scale asset purchases (LSAP). Otherwise known as quantitative easing (QE), in the US they were first announced all the way back in the darkest days of global financial panic in 2008. Yet, in 2012 and 2013 concerns remained that they could prove too powerful. Then-Richmond Fed [...]
In October 2006, the Communist Party of China unveiled a landmark new policy aimed at easing social and societal unrest in the country. The Chinese leadership would strive for a “harmonious society”, reaching this goal no later than 2020. As one of the final works for 16th Party Congress convened in 2002, it would stand as the template for how [...]
The housing bubble began to reverse in the middle of 2006. Strangely, Economists presented with the possibility were almost uniformly confident that it wouldn’t matter. Forgetting the market and liquidity issues, even by the middle of 2007 it was clear the end of the housing bubble had already restrained economic growth. Confidence abounded anyway, largely a result of the mistaken [...]
With UST yields backing up a little bit after the yield curve collapsed so far so fast, the combination of tax cut and reform “stimulus” juxtaposed with the constant, non-transitory mainstream message of recovery and growth has left us with yet another BOND ROUT!!! It has been somewhat if not completely reminiscent of earlier in 2017 when the mere promise [...]
The most significant part of China’s 19th Party Congress ended in the usual anticlimactic fashion. These events are for show, not debate. Like any good trial lawyer will tell you, you never ask a question in court that you don’t already know the answer to. For China’s Communists, that meant nominating Xi Jinping’s name to be written into the Communist [...]
I really don’t think people quite understand just how much trouble China is in right now. That’s no mystery because in the Western media the Chinese economy is almost always described as somewhere between awesome and magnificent (only slight hyperbole). Their government, on the other hand, is not fooled. General Secretary Xi Jinping opened the Communist Party’s 19th Congress with [...]
The problem with the Federal Reserve is that it is corrupt. I don’t mean that its staff is busy filling their days thinking up ways to cheat the American taxpayer, rather it is a philosophical sort of debasement. Many people think the Fed is evil and nefarious, others that its policymakers are plain stupid. Neither of those is true. Ben [...]
Back when the WTI curve was at its steepest contango, who was it that was buying up all that oil? A sheer vertical curve is an invitation to almost free money, very much like other curves everywhere else during the “rising dollar.” You could simultaneously buy crude at spot and sell it for delivery years ahead using a futures contract, [...]
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