In the earliest days of the eurodollar, its purpose was primarily as a global reserve medium to intermediate and finance trade. To surmount Triffin’s Paradox, this ledger system arose as demand for the reserve currency outstripped the Bretton Woods arrangement’s ability to supply it (because it was constrained by US gold reserves). Rebuilding first from WWII and then an explosion [...]
The US Census Bureau today reported that US imports of goods and services reached a record monthly high of $290.7 billion in October 2021. Just goods alone, the figure was $241.1 billion, which was 11% greater than the previous peak set way back in October 2018. With (questionable) media accounts continuing to highlight West Coast port traffic, there may not [...]
When Japan’s Ministry of Trade, Economy, and Industry (METI) reported earlier in November that Japanese Industrial Production (IP) had plunged again during the month of September 2021, it was so easy to just dismiss the decline as a product of delta COVID. According to these figures, industrial output fell an unsightly 5.4%...from August 2021, meaning month-over-month not year-over-year. Altogether, IP [...]
While most people were still digesting the headline US BLS report and its unemployment rate’s latest dip on Friday, over in Germany a few hours before the American release the other country’s economic bean counters at deStatis had already published some puzzling, seemingly inconsistent data. Measuring total industrial output, Industrial Production, the Germans said theirs had declined by a substantial [...]
It was said to be the absolutely perfect scenario (see: below). The vaccines put an end to the pandemic within sight, combined with intractable problems getting any iron out of the ground and then shipped somewhere useful, demand for the commodity was expected to be robust and better while at the same time supply would remain constricted. With American consumers [...]
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary commitment. I never set out nor imagined that a quarter century after embarking on what I thought would be a career managing portfolios, researching markets, and picking investments, I’d instead have to spend a good amount of my time in the future taking apart how raw economic data is collected, tabulated, and then disseminated. Yet [...]
There was never really any answer given by the Chinese Communists for why their own export data diverged so much from other import estimates gathered by its largest trading partners. Ostensibly different sides of the same thing, it’s not like anyone asked Xi Jinping to weigh in; they report what numbers they have and consider them authoritative.However, the United States’ [...]
Spend even a modest amount of time on the subject, and the distinct impression you are left with is that American ports and railyards are dealing with a truly epic jam because the economy has been so good there’s just too many goods for anyone to reasonably handle. Juiced by the federal government’s helicopters, Americans spent, spent some more, and [...]
The inventory saga, planetary in its reach. As you’ve heard, American demand for goods supercharged by the federal government’s helicopter combined with a much more limited capacity to rebound in the logistics of the goods economy left a nightmare for supply chains. As we’ve been writing lately, a highly unusual maybe unprecedented inventory cycle resulted (creating “inflation”).The worse the shipping [...]
As another central bank, the Federal Reserve, seriously contemplates tapering its latest QE, its policymaking members would do well to consider the several others who either did or thought they should. One of them, obviously, the same Fed but back in 2013. Another was the Bank of Japan early in 2018.It was March that year and “monetary” officials gathering around [...]
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