As France’s Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde objected strenuously to Ben Bernanke’s second act. Hinted at in August 2010, QE2 was finally unleashed in November to global condemnation. Where “trade wars” fill media pages today, “currency wars” did back then. The Americans were undertaking beggar-thy-neighbor policies to unfairly weaken the dollar. The neighbor everyone though most likely to be sponged off [...]
On the one hand, it’s a small silver lining in how many even in the mainstream are beginning to realize that there really is something wrong. Then again, they are using “trade wars” to make sense of how that could be. For the one, at least they’ve stopped saying China’s economy is strong and always looks resilient no matter what [...]
IHS Markit reported last week that its composite Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) rebounded slightly in its first reading for June 2018. In January, the index had managed nearly 59, the highest in a very long time. It was taken as a definitive sign that Europe’s economy was not only booming, that boom was sustainable. Global liquidations struck at the end [...]
The title is a shorthand way of saying that the most recent performance of the economy isn't predictive of the future performance of the stock market. The bottom line is that GDP growth today doesn't necessarily mean stock price growth today - GDP growth and stock returns are not highly correlated. In fact, some analysis suggests that they are negatively [...]
Newton's Third Law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Economics is certainly not science so the application of Newton's law would seem inappropriate for analyzing the global economy, but in today's world I think it is apt; more growth here means less growth there, a zero sum game of aggregate demand ping pong. It was almost [...]
There's been a lot of talk recently about deflation - no I'm not talking about the New England Patriots - so maybe it's a good time to talk about what it really is and why so many economists seem to be in a tizzy about the possibility. For most of the folks who spend their time pondering such things, deflation [...]
So here we are nearly 6 years removed from the last global financial crisis – surely not the last – and while a lot has been done by global economic policymakers, it seems that not much has really been accomplished. Globally, debt has risen since the crisis despite the cries from some quarters of “austerity”; deleveraging is a myth. Even [...]
I have recently been accused of being a paid up member of the gloom and doom club. Well, actually accused might be too strong; informed is probably more accurate. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about how these weekly missives might be perceived but based on recent feedback the perception out there seems to be that I've turned [...]
Gold dropped 20%. Oil dropped over 10%. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index dropped 11%. The US Dollar rose. Last week? No, that's what happened in the first week of July of 2008. Last week's rout in the commodities markets was eerily similar to that week nearly 5 years ago when the first signs of the great financial crisis were coming [...]
Late Friday the Treasury Department released its semi-annual report on global exchange rates or as I like to call it, the semi-annual report on why all other countries on planet earth should let their currencies rise against the UD Dollar. Or maybe the semi-annual report on how easy monetary policy by other countries' central banks is bad but it isn't [...]
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