The oil market has caught a mild case of the raging disease. Not COVID, rather the purported cure for it. Vaccine-phoria has visited the energy sector and propelled oil prices upward while pulling less contango in the futures curve, awakening this commodity market from its post-August doldrums. It had been that detour in WTI which began to suggest this summer [...]
Survivor’s euphoria, but then what? Reopening momentum, though would that be enough on its own? More of a concern, the uptrend was heavily infused by government intervention. How much was organic, how much wastefully artificial (in the sense of “stimulus”; as economic aid, it was necessary)? So many questions, so much to try and sort out as we enter the [...]
Why the big deal about the Fed’s new grand strategy? For one thing, as noted yesterday, there’s that whole lost decade which policymakers finally have acknowledged. They’ve quite a lot of catching up to do, but have waited for the most inopportune moment to…basically do more of the same things that hadn’t accomplished anything other than lose an entire decade.Already [...]
Entering 2020, before overreactions to COVID and the shutdown they brought, private income derived from all sources had slowed to the lowest rate since 2010 (not counting 2013, that year skewed by tax changes which were implemented finishing up 2012). According to the latest annual revisions for it, last year, 2019, was a bit more recessionary than previously thought especially [...]
The payroll report for May was a shock because it came in as a plus when analysts, whomever they are, were expecting another huge minus. It seemed to set the tone for a realistic pathway being made out in the shape of the most perfect “V” ever written down. The mistake, such that there has been one, was interpreting the [...]
The missing piece so far is consumers. We’ve gotten a glimpse at how businesses are taking in the shock, both shocks, actually, in that corporations are battening down the liquidity hatches at all possible speed and excess. Not a good sign, especially as it provides some insight into why jobless claims (as the only employment data we have for beyond [...]
It’s really not hard to appreciate why markets are freaking out right now. The economic narrative is, and has been, all wrong. Jay Powell says that faraway overseas pressures had taken just a little off what had been awesome economic growth. Despite what had become an obvious drag on trade and manufacturing, the unemployment rate, to Powell, spoke softly to [...]
The Federal Reserve added the word “symmetric” to its inflation goal for a reason. Back in May 2018 when it was made official officials made quite a big deal out of it. It was for two reasons, actually, both of them intertwined in the way Economists believe the economic system is supposed to work; and the central bank’s place in [...]
They absolutely loved the China PMI numbers, after having taken no note of Japan’s IP, dismissed Markit’s slightly higher revisions, and then totally hated the ISM’s Manufacturing PMI. That last one was supposed to join the others in moving substantially upward, contributing to widespread hopes all recession fears have been extinguished even this late into 2019. Instead, the Institute of [...]
Chairman Powell’s hawkishness, so called, has made its way into the historical revisions for Personal Income estimates. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released today the annual benchmark revisions to NIPA, the National Income and Product Accounts, which apply to Personal Income and Personal Spending. We’ve already seen the results for GDP and underlying data for corporate profits. What the [...]
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