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Unfortunately Like Old Times: Back To Being The Star of the Payroll Show

By |2020-09-04T19:08:01-04:00September 4th, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The star of the show once again was the unemployment rate. Since the ratio is a byproduct of the Household Survey, not the Establishment Survey, that means the surprise upside in the other labor survey overshadowed the slowing rate of change in the payroll number everyone usually watches so much more closely. The headline figure gained +1.37mm payrolls (Est. Survey) [...]

Less Shine In The Sentiment Formula

By |2020-01-21T17:47:21-05:00January 21st, 2020|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The IMF yesterday downgraded its forecasts for global growth as well as its real GDP estimates for all the big economy regions. The organization now thinks GDP growth might have amounted to 2.9% last year. Not only the worst year since 2009, that was down from April 2019 approximations of 3.6% and the original forecasts which always start out near [...]

Payrolls Too; Inflation Hysteria Gives Way to Inversion Unease

By |2018-12-07T12:08:45-05:00December 7th, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

Unfortunately for Jay Powell, labor statistics are at best backward looking and often just plain misleading. Can you imagine if the wage data contained with November 2018’s payroll report had been released last December instead? Today, pretty much nobody cares anymore. We’ve flipped from inflation hysteria to inversion unease and that was always the appropriate direction. Average hourly earnings increased [...]

BoJ On 2.3%: ‘the decline in the unemployment rate is insufficient’

By |2018-11-06T16:06:39-05:00November 6th, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

The 21st century central banker is a unicorn chaser. This has happened by default, a product of too little success despite ever-increasing interventions. In fact, the bigger these policy intrusions become the more likely it is the central bankers will attempt to turn something small into something big. It doesn’t matter that economies are noisy by nature. The best example [...]

Someone Is On Drugs, Alright

By |2018-05-03T18:10:34-04:00May 3rd, 2018|Bonds, Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

For the second straight quarter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates US productivity growth was less than 1%. That’s not surprising given the weakening in output as measured by GDP, the data reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Productivity is the bridge between the BLS’s labor numbers and the more general economic assessments of the BEA (Private [...]

Where’s The Boom (Serious Question)?

By |2018-02-01T18:25:02-05:00February 1st, 2018|Currencies, Economy, Federal Reserve/Monetary Policy, Markets|

If there is a boom here, I just don’t see it. Perhaps the term itself needs to be clearly defined. The common definition is a broad-based and sustained expansion, one that is beneficial to a wide cross-section of any society experiencing it. Since this is still nominally a capitalist system, eroded as it may be in some parts, “broad” would [...]

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