US Industrial Productions continues to more and more resemble the worst of the Euro$ #3, that “manufacturing recession” of four years ago. Back at the end of 2014 and lasting well into 2016, IP was led lower by the oil crash among other problems. They called it a supply glut but we all know that wasn’t ever the case. What [...]
I have never understood the infatuation with randomness. When I was first introduced to statistics at a very young age, I had a hard time at first trying to comprehend the paradigm in my own intuitive fashion. It seemed like something was off about it, where random chance was the cornerstone of a philosophy trying to describe and predict a [...]
The stock market has its earnings season, the regular quarterly reports of all the companies that have publicly traded stocks. In economic accounts, there is something similar though it only happens once a year. It is benchmark revision season, and it has been brought to a few important accounts already. Given that this is a backward looking exercise, that this [...]
The Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index (LMCI) wasn’t put together until the May 2014, but it was back-tested extensively to ensure that its various assumptions fit with observed conditions in the US economy – no matter what those conditions might have been or be in the future. Even still, given its nature as an amalgamation of 19 separate labor [...]
The advance estimate for Q4 GDP was not appreciably different than the preliminary figures, changing +0.6% into +1.00033%. It wasn’t anywhere close to enough of a revision to meaningfully alter the picture of the 2015 economy. The average growth in 2015 was just 2.40% (until the next revision next month) compared to 2.43% in 2014; while the average of SAAR [...]
Industrial production contracted again in August at a rate (month-over-month) similar to that in June. That would suggest the rebound in July was the aberration since IP has now declined in seven out of the eight months this year. The year-over-year growth rate of just 0.9% would have been the worst of the “recovery” except that downward revisions forced June’s [...]
Lost in the euphoria over second quarter GDP revisions is the ongoing corporate struggle in terms of profits and how that suggests a more than reasonable proportion of GDP’s ability to measure the economy is overstated. To this point, I had focused more so on the productivity problems as they related to a potential over-optimism of the labor market but [...]
According to the latest GDP revisions I may have been off in my projection of where the recession began. I wrote in 2013 that if pressed I would name October 2012 as the start of the recession. There were many reasons for that assessment; retail sales suddenly and sharply slowing, durable goods and particularly capital goods orders contracting and a [...]
The benchmark revisions (trend-cycle) to durable goods left us with a smaller estimated economy but that wasn’t supposed to be a problem because all that matters supposedly is what comes next. In other words, the cycle was already deficient so the scale of that deficiency was not meant to suggest anything about the next phase, according to economic projections. If [...]
A couple more points about GDP revisions and the outlook for Q2. First, with inventory revisions factored, GDP less the inventory contribution was -1.03%; worse than last year’s polar vortex problem. It was the worst quarterly result since the Great Recession, which more than suggests economic weakness as more than just winter or seasonal adjustments. If there is any seasonal [...]
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