There was absolutely nothing good about the most recent trade data for June. Even what looked like an improvement really wasn’t, suggesting, strongly, that conditions in the global economy are still declining. With Canada falling to recession, blaming a “puzzling” and sharp decline in non-petroleum exports (the US as that nation’s biggest customer), the decline in US import “demand” completing [...]
When looking at cyclical inflections, GDP is the last to know about it. That has been the case at cyclical turns in each of the last three peaks, most especially how GDP treated the first half of the Great Recession. More recently, given the abomination of cyclical behavior, GDP finally after three years caught up with the 2012 slowdown. As [...]
With factory orders continuing to be much worse than they appear, it makes sense to try to measure the effect of over-optimism accounted by inventory. Recessions themselves were once almost exclusively set up by this one factor, as the difference between production and sales, caught up within the supply chain, eventually works out toward alignment. Companies are willing to hold [...]
According to the latest GDP revisions I may have been off in my projection of where the recession began. I wrote in 2013 that if pressed I would name October 2012 as the start of the recession. There were many reasons for that assessment; retail sales suddenly and sharply slowing, durable goods and particularly capital goods orders contracting and a [...]
I typically stay away from sentiment indicators and measures of “confidence” not just because they are of dubious construction but they often don’t mean what they are taken for. In the case of consumer confidence, you get both problems simultaneously particularly at the ends of each cycle. In other words, just as “confidence” is at its greatest point and economists, [...]
Last month’s retail sales report for May was taken as the definitive sign that the slump had passed and that the conventional view of the jobs market was finally, if surprisingly belatedly, taking shape. It did not matter to economists that the only basis for that interpretation was seasonal adjustments, which had produced a huge disparity with the unadjusted set. [...]
Last week, the CBO updated some of its calculations and methods for estimating the effects of “automatic stabilizers” on the deficit. These are Keynesian concepts whereby the government increases spending or redistribution (redundant) without discretion as the economy falls into the downside of a cycle. For the CBO’s purposes, the agency measures automatic stabilizers not on their effects, intended effects [...]
Durable goods orders and now shipments continue to be a serious drag on the overall economy. On a year-over-year basis, shipments joined orders in contracting for both durable goods (ex transportation) and capital goods. For some, there was a glimpse of hope in that the seasonally-adjusted category of new orders for capital goods rose in May, but that was, as [...]
The home market may literally be testing the notion that interest rate manipulation has the net effect of pulling forward demand. Existing home sales, as tabulated by the National Association of Realtors, surged in May to a new six-year high. That sounds like terrific news about a rebound in the real estate market after quite a rough period dating back [...]
There was a reason FDR’s administration in its first 100 days took the order it did. Contrary to some assertions, Executive Order 6102 was not a lawless expansion of executive privilege and prerogative. It had a very lawful basis, underwritten by the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 which itself was based on (and no part of this fact should be [...]
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