There were no surprises in the updated JOLTS estimates for December 2016, just more of the same sideways. The level of Job Openings was 5.501 million (SA), practically unchanged from November’s 5.505 million. The BLS estimates that Job Openings have been stuck at around that level since April 2015. In terms of Hires, that series, too, was practically unchanged in [...]
US exports grew by 5.6% year-over-year (NSA) in December, the fourth gain in the past five months. It was the highest growth rate since October 2013. On the incoming trade side, imports advanced 2.4% year-over-year after rising 5.1% in November. Those were the first consecutive monthly increases since the last two months of 2014. The trade figures add further evidence [...]
With JPY pushing above its recent resistance (for whatever might have caused it), it is useful to determine if that is an idiosyncratic change or whether there are other “dollar” indications that support a possible breakout. This is especially true given what I think is causing the move in JPY, namely that “reflation” had been initially predicated on ideas of [...]
As noted earlier, the Bank of Japan has a whole host of problems over its QQE with YCC attachments. Japan’s central bank has belatedly discovered Finance 101, where being one-dimensional doesn’t actually help the cause of “stimulus.” For far too long official policy has been lower, lower, and lower, whether that was carried out in JGB yields or whether it [...]
The Bank of Japan had announced another acronym with which to add to QQE, a term that already includes an extra “Q”, on September 21, 2016. It was a bizarre engagement, like something out of a TV advertisement for laundry detergent or diet supplements where the central bank marketed the same QQE that you always knew and loved but now [...]
QE and ZIRP were monetary experiments, though that is not how they were presented. In public, QE in particular was given a subtext of certainty, that Ben Bernanke’s Fed (or Mario Draghi’s ECB) knew exactly what it took to get the job done and furthermore would get right at it. It was a job that all Americans of all kinds [...]
The most basic link in finance is that between risk and reward. Just like alchemists who once sought a path to gold from lead, a great deal of modern finance was built around finding a shortcut between them. Discovering the great asymmetry where risks would be low but rewards sky high was the Holy Grail of later 20th century mathematics. [...]
Factory orders rose 2.0% in December 2016 year-over-year (NSA), the fourth positive number in the last five months. In what is a perfect commentary on the sorrowful state of the economy, it was highest growth rate since September 2014. It seems increasingly likely that the manufacturing recession attached to the “rising dollar”, the one that created a near-recession for the [...]
The payroll reports are most often assigned a level of credibility that strains credibility. As if written in stone delivered from the infallible, they are the economic stats that most people pay attention to and from where they derive most of their views on the economy. This isn’t without some good reason, as in prior economic periods there was a [...]
In addition to all the myriad indications of a serious labor market slowdown last year, despite the fact that the unemployment rate has been 5% or less since September 2015, and in all likelihood was that again in January, there is no indication of any acceleration in wages or earnings. None. The labor market just is not as it is [...]
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