It’s a pretty simple question, at least when asked by a member of the American citizenry not already compelled by one bias or another. Did the 2009 “stimulus” bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; or ARRA) work? The answer depends upon who you ask, including breaking down along partisan lines. To Democrat Economists, it absolutely did. For their Republican counterparts, [...]
The lull in US consumer spending on goods has reached a fifth month. The annual comparisons aren’t good, yet they somewhat mask the more recent problems appearing in the figures. According to the Census Bureau, total retail sales in January rose 4.58% year-over-year (unadjusted). Not a good number, but better, seemingly, than early on in 2019 when the series was [...]
The boom never boomed. That’s what made the bond and money curves so flat in 2018. The data, the real economy behind the numbers, never matched the rhetoric. Even GDP. We’re in much the same position today, only starting from much weaker and worse. The rhetoric is still positive, except now it’s about a turnaround. But, and this is the [...]
It wasn’t actually Keynes who coined the term “pump priming”, though he became famous largely for advocating for it. Instead, it was Herbert Hoover, of all people, who began using it to describe (or try to) his Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Hardly the do-nothing Roosevelt accused Hoover of being, as President, FDR’s predecessor was the most aggressive in American history to [...]
The Chicago Fed’s National Activity Index (NAI) fell pretty sharply in October. At -0.71, that’s a reading which suggests the US economy may be operating significantly below trend. Fifty-eight of the 85 monthly indicators which make up the statistic made negative contributions. Of course, “below trend” is an imprecise term and doesn’t by itself stand up to the one question [...]
Before the Great “Recession” ended the business cycle as we once knew it, there was a widely accepted concept known as stall speed. In the US, if GDP growth decelerated down to around 2% it suggested the system had reached a danger zone of sorts. In a such a weakened state, one good push, or shock, could send the economy [...]
Any recession still retains its inventory roots. Back when manufacturing ruled the US economy, an unanticipated buildup would be all it took to trigger one. Goods would begin stacking up on the wholesale level once retailers found it harder to move what they already had. This in turn caused wholesalers to put the brakes on manufacturing which then triggered production [...]
The Federal Reserve has been maintaining statistics on American industry for nearly as long as there has been a Federal Reserve. The first entry in the data series on Industrial Production is for the month of January ’19. Not 2019 but 1919. With over a hundred years of relatively consistent data, matching up very well with overall trends in the [...]
People have started to look back fondly upon the Asian flu. It was as global disaster, a dollar shortage which spread all across mostly Asia but not exclusively. The reason why it is talked about positively nowadays is LTCM and rate cuts. Popular myth has it that Greenspan’s Fed properly handled any economic fallout due to the former by enacting [...]
According to revised figures, things were really looking up for US industry. For the month of April 2018, the Federal Reserve’s Diffusion Index (3-month) for Industrial Production hit 68.2. Like a lot of other sentiment indicators, this was the highest in so long it had to be something. For this particular index, it hadn’t seen better than 68 since way [...]
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