The Federal Reserve has been on a mission lately to make sure everyone knows they are serious about killing the inflation they created. Over the last two weeks, Federal Reserve officials delivered 37 speeches, all of the speakers competing to see who could be the most hawkish. Interest rates are going up they said, no matter how much it hurts, [...]
At some point, these are just numbers. By themselves, numbers give you no context, nor any sense of bearings. Arithmetic merely lines everything up and counts what goes where. To a top-down central economic planning structure, everything is as if a spreadsheet; if X, then Y.But then what?China’s 13th National People’s Congress jumped into its fifth annual session this past [...]
In the manufacturing sector we find the most supreme test of economic credentials. Despite what is clearly taking place, the mainstream, orthodox outlook and assessment continues to dominate. There isn’t any doubt anymore about the manufacturing sector, as recession not only is broad enough there on its own it continues to deepen and darken. Yet, because Janet Yellen declared the [...]
In some sense when trying to analyze the difference between an ill-suited measure and that same ill-suited measure seasonally adjusted amounts to Isaac D’Israeli’s critique of Thomistic tendencies toward using otherwise useful brainpower for pointless ends (thus, how many angels can dance on the point of a needle – not the head of a pin as the modern colloquial version [...]
To add another point to my earlier post on price changes and spending/revenue patterns, Gallup’s various economic polls show what I think are exactly the same problems. In the daily spending poll, the amount of self-reported spending has not really grown going all the way back to February 2013. Twenty months of largely stagnation is worse than it sounds given [...]
With all of the credit market fireworks that leaked into stocks, the pace of economic reassurance from “authorities” has been rather steady and a bit more emphatic. Despite the attempts at managing perceptions, there has been very little actual success in persuading. In many ways this is like the unfolding ebola drama in that there is a palpable disconnect between [...]
With last week’s release of the Financial Accounts of the United States (formerly known as the Flow of Funds; still designated Z1 by the Fed’s system) we can add to yesterday’s examination about bubbles and market risk. Putting the figures together, the composite picture is one where stocks are as stretched in terms of valuations to a degree only seen [...]
There was a bit of a stir caused by Dutch logistics firm, TNT Express. The company has been expressing caution, if not downright pessimism about its prospects due to economic considerations. Today, it lowered its targets for growth, with the stock taking a beating in so doing. However, it is the manner of that downgrade that should be seriously considered, [...]
Gallup’s daily spending tracking poll dipped slightly in August, but what matters most is that spending levels have been flat now going back more than a year. There is no insight provided as to why that has occurred, only that people at the bottom ends of the income spectrum are unwilling or, more likely, unable to increase their economic activity. [...]
Now that the FOMC has been sufficiently conscious to see the economy as something other than the long-awaited arrival Recovery Summer, it might pay to revisit the basis for this downward trajectory. It is simply not enough of a step forward to admit there is a problem, you have to do as Eric Rosengren candidly counseled and commit to finding [...]
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