In February 2015, a 109-car CSX train derailed near Mount Carbon in West Virginia. The fire the derailment sparked was so massive that firefighters could only stand by and watch it burn itself out. That took just about a week. The reason was the train’s cargo, about 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude oil. It was just the latest [...]
In late summer last year, just in time to accompany the first blast of contraindicated economic reality, Statistics Canada announced that Canadian GDP had contracted in Q2 2015. That followed an “unexpected” drop in Canadian GDP in Q1 which was supposed to be like oil prices and only a “transitory” deviation on the road to ultimate monetary policy success. Even [...]
One follow up point to this morning’s missive about why the economy seems to be converging in recession rather than full and blossoming recovery: There must be something said about the manner of redistribution in this “cycle” as different from all others. In other words, the Fed has been attempting greater and greater redistribution efforts via monetary interference ever since [...]
For something that central bankers and economists were so sure wasn’t ever going to be troubling, oil seems to have become something of a communicable financial disease at the outset of 2016. If 2015 was somewhat sour and disappointing, 2016 was supposed to leave no doubt; it is, just not in the manner predicted. This morning’s headlines tell you all [...]
The poor and impoverished state of the world is no true wonder given those that have claimed for themselves the “duty” of exceedingly routine disruption and wholesale distrust of markets in favor of their own very narrow interests and abilities. These are the people that give us such incompetence passing as expert and "useful" central planning: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/666301870521102336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Nothing like another [...]
With global economic perceptions finally creeping toward financial perceptions (not stocks) despite the enormous and mostly ongoing “stimulus” almost everywhere, it is useful to review once more the assumed general mechanisms. Step 1 is really the most basic and traditional element of central banking, as liquidity, broadly speaking here, is currency elasticity in its more modern format. Increasing liquidity is [...]
The Jackson Hole gathering may end up providing at least some clarification, but not even close to the manner in which everyone seems intent on inferring. With Janet Yellen’s notable absence, there isn’t the same sort of celebrity about what would have been the media hanging upon every word; that is, after all, what the Federal Reserve has become, not [...]
The old cliché is that everything of significance in life is a marathon rather than a sprint. In Japan, such sentiment strains all reason as there is no way that any marathon, economic or otherwise, could possibly be expected to last more twenty-five years. But here it is in 2015, thirty years after the Plaza Accord and BoJ’s first massive [...]
Japan continues to provide the best refutation of monetary policy as anything other than destructive. With its economy stripped bare of dynamic essentials after thirty years of the Bank of Japan’s “lead”, marginal changes are left as remnants of nothing more than monetary transmission. In the space of QQE, that has used up and destroyed what was left of Japan’s [...]
To add depth to the consumer credit version of consumer inclinations in 2015, Gallup’s estimates of daily spending in March came in at $86. That was only $4 greater than February’s $82 which hadn’t rebounded at all from January. In other words, there is “something” wrong with consumers so far in 2015, even as compared to prior years of lethargy. [...]
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