Another economic discussion lost to the eventual coronavirus pandemic mania was the 2019 globally synchronized downturn. Not just downturn, outright recession in key parts from around the world, maybe including the US. We’ll simply never know for sure because just when it was happening COVID struck and then governments overrode everything including unfolding history.What anyone can say for sure is [...]
The American people were first introduced to the Treasury helicopter in 2008, not 2021. The Bush Administration's “radical” approach to keeping the Great “Recession” from becoming a contraction, obviously, failed spectacularly even though the initial returns had been positive – literally positive in how Q2 ’08 GDP suddenly turned higher as if this was by skilled design. Economists, including those [...]
After a stunningly bad October and November, the Census Bureau reports US imports rebounded in December 2019 on a seasonally-adjusted basis. Having fallen below $200 billion for the first time since October 2017, total imports of goods rose to $205.8 billion in the final month of last year. However, most of that increase, two-thirds of it, was due to “industrial [...]
You don’t have to tell Mexico the bad news about how US auto sales ended 2019. They already know; in fact, knew ahead of time. Production workers who should be busy building more and more new cars for sale outside of Mexico, particularly for prospective American owners, must instead be worried if they’ll still have a job if things go [...]
When I write that there are no winners around the world, what I mean is more comprehensive than just the trade wars. On that one narrow account, of course there are winners and losers. The Chinese are big losers, as the Census Bureau numbers plainly show (as well as China’s own). But even the winners of the trade wars find [...]
For US importers, October is their month. And it makes perfect sense how it would be. With the Christmas season about to kick into full swing each and every November, the time for retailers to stock up in hearty anticipation is in the weeks beforehand. The goods, a good many future Christmas presents, find themselves in transit from all over [...]
You can see the pattern, a weathervane of sorts in its own right. Not for how the economy is actually going, mind you, more along the lines of how it is being perceived from the high-level perspective. The green light for “trade wars” in the first place was what Janet Yellen and Jay Powell had said about the economy. Because [...]
Back in April, while she was quietly jockeying to make sure her name was placed at the top of the list to succeed Mario Draghi at the ECB, Christine Lagarde detoured into the topic of central bank independence. At a joint press conference held with the Governor of the Reserve Bank of South Africa, Lesetja Kganyago, as the Managing Director [...]
Talk of trade deals is everywhere. Markets can’t get enough of it, even the here-to-fore pessimistic bond complex. Rates have backed up as a few whispers of BOND ROUT!!! reappear from their one-year slumber. If Trump broke the global economy, then his trade deal fixes it. There’s another way of looking at it, though. Why did the President go spoiling [...]
December 16, 2015, was perhaps the perfect synopsis of Janet Yellen’s mercifully brief tenure. First Ben Bernanke and then Yellen had spent 2014 telling everyone the US economy was in more danger of overheating (best jobs market in decades, they said) and therefore not only would the FOMC taper and terminate QE there would be rate hikes to follow closely [...]
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