It is time to start paying attention to PMI’s again, some of them. There are those like the ISM’s Manufacturing Index which remains off in a world of its own. The version of the goods economy suggested by this one index is very different than almost every other. It skyrocketed in late summer last year way out of line (highest [...]
Just in time to follow closely upon yesterday’s European circus, IHS Markit piles on with more of the same forward-looking indications looking forward the wrong way. Mario Draghi says the ECB is ending QE, good for him. The central bank will do this despite balanced risks rebalancing in a different place. The more bad news and numbers stack up the [...]
By the time things got really bad, China’s economy had already been slowing for a long time. The currency spun out of control in August 2015, and then by November the Chinese central bank was in desperation mode. The PBOC had begun to peg SHIBOR because despite so much monetary “stimulus” in rate cuts and a lower RRR banks were [...]
It is definitely one period that they got wrong. Still, IHS Markit’s Composite PMI for the US economy has been one of the better forward-looking indicators around. Tying to real GDP, this blend of manufacturing and services sentiment has predicted the general economic trend in the United States pretty closely. The latter half of 2015 was the big exception. For [...]
Overseas turmoil continues in October. The Chinese government released its Purchasing Managers Indices (PMI) for both manufacturing and services. Each one came in at a multi-month low. The National Bureau of Statistics calculated that the manufacturing version was just 50.2 this month, the lowest level since July 2016. The Non-manufacturing PMI fell sharply to 53.9 from 54.9 in September. October’s [...]
Here they come. After spending more than a year talking about nothing but good things ahead for the global economy, Economists are beginning to sound worried. In 2017, there wasn’t anything that could stand in the way of synchronized growth. In 2018, there’s no longer any synchronized growth, so now we can talk about what was standing in the way. [...]
Last year around this time, the tropics provided some unintentional basis for what would become hysteria. Hurricane Harvey by soaking a major metropolitan area with a biblical amount of rainfall delighted Keynesians everywhere. So much destruction, so much economic growth potential on the rebuild. Then Irma flirted with the Gulf Coast spine of Florida for good measure. For several months, [...]
You get the impression often that these guys have no idea what drives the dollar. They cling to all sorts of theories, of course, from interest rate differentials to perceptions of economic strength. That seemed to be the case in 2017 and its “weak dollar” environment. Globally synchronized growth would mean potency pretty much everywhere, thus, in this view, a [...]
At this particular juncture eight months into 2018, the only thing that will help is abrupt and serious acceleration. On this side of May 29, it is way past time for it to get real. The global economy either synchronizes in a major, unambiguous breakout or markets retrench even more. That’s been the basis of this thing from Day 1; [...]
The entire purpose of China’s presumed rebalancing act is supposedly that the country’s economy will no longer be strongly linked to industry. Manufacturing, for export in particular, is what made modern China into an economic powerhouse, transforming a once agrarian subsistence society (thanks to socialism). One need only look at overhead or satellite images of those cities chosen as special [...]
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