In its 84th Annual Report released last June, the Bank for International Settlements departed from usual central bankish conventions and decried the growing departure from market discipline and even reality. The BIS even used the loaded term “euphoric” to describe what it saw as risk market prices no longer affected by fundamental economic conditions. As the Financial Times noted then, [...]
The initial indications from private retail metrics on the Black Friday kickoff were not good, though numerous attempts to downplay those results were initiated. The monthly retail sales figures from the Census Bureau will make that much harder as they square with the downbeat Black Friday estimates. In other words, Black Friday wasn’t “off” because consumers were “pulled” to shop [...]
All you need to know about the surge in Q3 GDP is in the charts below: Did the weather change in 2013 so much to account for a huge production surge (without a similar change in sales)? Is no-one buying US food products? Perhaps data collection methods a little askew? There aren’t any obvious answers here. The scale of both [...]
If one were to objectively at a broad range of data points, you might be tempted to declare, as the NBER does, a cycle peak for some time in mid-2012 (perhaps October?). Given yesterday’s update to GDP, increasing the growth rate by 0.8% to an illusory 3.6%, one might also conclude a peak in the mini-cycle. Of all the subcomponents, [...]
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