Durable goods orders declined for the third consecutive month in April, meaning with January’s flat reading that new orders for this important segment of consumer “demand” has been consistently shrinking in all of 2015 so far. New orders for capital goods have been negative year-over-year in all four months. With the pace of shipments just now starting to decelerate, it [...]
A little over two years ago, in the middle of April 2013, there was a gold crash that came seemingly out of nowhere. Worse, for gold investors anyway, that crash was repeated just a few months later. Where gold had stood just shy of $1,800 an ounce at the start of QE3, those cascades had brought the metal price down [...]
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what [...]
Japanese bank stocks surged over 50% from December 2012 through the first half of 2013. Since, they have been in what one might call a consolidation phase. The initial surge coincided with expectations of the effects of Abenomics. The consolidation was a 1.5 - 2 year wait and see period, somewhat of a battle between believers and doubters. Now, there has [...]
In the age of ZIRP it can be difficult to gain perspective especially about interest rate movements. Trying to analyze the ups and downs including any relevance or importance is clouded by the lack of historical clarity on that account. We really have no idea about the true significance of scales at and near the zero lower bound because this [...]
The FOMC statement this week made a great deal about what amounts to charges of statistical impropriety toward the BEA’s GDP figures. The first quarter always seems to amount to a slow part of the season, which it really is because there is the massive Christmas buildup. It is clear that the Federal Reserve, referring to this not just in [...]
Volatility in UST trading declined a bit in the past few days, as treasury yields became far more settled intraday. While that breaks the exact duplication Monday and Tuesday this week traced from Monday and Tuesday last week, the past two weeks overall remain remarkably similar. And for all the noise, the ups and downs along the way, treasury yields [...]
Sticking with the sentiment factor for the economy, or at least in mostly unhelpful measurements for it, it is interesting that most of the manufacturing and business sentiment indices are failing to find the FOMC’s “transitory” economic nature. The most helpful so far has been the Chicago Business Barometer, but that merely ticked above 50 after finding two months at [...]
If there were an economic recovery in the US then we would certainly find it on the fiscal budgets of the various states. You cannot spend or even generate income anymore without taking incidence of a taxable transaction. So if the US economy has been doing what the FOMC says it has, then the taxman will tell us. Even here [...]
To preserve any idea that the US is not heading into recession, the FOMC is now wholly reliant on statistical processes within the BEA’s use of the Census Bureau’s updated ARIMA-X13 modeling system. It is amazing to see this policy body that once proclaimed, unequivocally and forcefully, that it could perform the monetary equivalent of sorcery and alchemy reduced to [...]
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