Tag Archives: 5) Global Macro

When the 4% who generate the jobs and tax revenues have had enough and leave, the effects quickly impact the 64%. At the end of any trend, everyone’s a true believer: this trend is so enduring, so broad-based, so based on unchanging fundamentals that it will never ever reverse. One such trend is the white-hot growth of housing, employment, tax revenues, etc. in major urban magnets for global capital and talent: you know...

Given that the economy is now totally and completely dependent on inflating asset bubbles, it makes no sense to invest for the long-term. Beneath the endlessly hyped expansion in gross domestic product (GDP) of the past two decades, the economy has changed dramatically. The American Dream boils down to social and economic mobility, a.k.a. getting ahead through hard work, merit and wise investments in oneself and one’s...

If the “equation” CNY DOWN = BAD is valid, and it is, then what drives CNY downward in the first place? In conventional Economics, authorities command the currency to affect the level of exports. In reality, that’s not at all how it works. The eurodollar system of shadow money is almost purely calculated risk versus return. Before August 2007, everywhere there was believed (far) more return than risk. It’s the nature...

There is a name for this institutionalized, commoditized fraud: moral decay. Moral decay is an interesting phenomenon: we spot it easily in our partisan-politics opponents and BAU (business as usual) government/private-sector dealings (are those $3,000 Pentagon hammers now $5,000 each or $10,000 each? It’s hard to keep current…), and we’re suitably indignant when non-partisan corruption is discovered in supposed...

The forced flight from unaffordable and dysfunctional urban regions is as yet a trickle, but watch what happens when a recession causes widespread layoffs in high-wage sectors. For hundreds of years, rural poverty has driven people to urban areas: cities offer paying work and abundant opportunities to get ahead, and these financial incentives have transformed the human populace from largely rural to largely urban in the...

The Chinese economy grew at a faster rate than expected in the first quarter as policy stimulus effects kick in. The National Bureau of Statistics of China published Q1 GDP figures along with some key economic indicators for March. The data generally surprised on the upside. While we had previously flagged the upside risk to our earlier GDP forecast following the rebound in PMIs and strong credit numbers, the latest...

President Trump’s focus on getting re-elected in November 2020 may have implications for his economic policy choices. As we move closer to the 2020 presidential election, Trump has been blatantly leaning on the Federal Reserve to be more accommodative and has been trying to appoint nominees who share his preference for loose monetary policy to the Fed board. The countdown to the 2020 elections also seems to be prompting...

It had been 55 months, nearly five years since China’s vast and troubled industrial sector had seen growth better than 8%. Not since the first sparks of the rising dollar, Euro$ #3’s worst, had Industrial Production been better than that mark. What used to be a floor had seemingly become an unbreakable ceiling over this past half a decade. According to Chinese estimates, IP in March 2019 was 8.5% more than it was in...

Extreme levels of debt and overvaluation characterize the entire global economy, and are not limited to any one nation or sector. Financial crises come in two flavors: fraud and credit-valuation over-reach.Fraud-based financial crises may differ in particulars, but they share many traits: perverse incentives are institutionalized; the perverse incentives reward figuring out how to evade oversight via fraud,...

According to revised figures, things were really looking up for US industry. For the month of April 2018, the Federal Reserve’s Diffusion Index (3-month) for Industrial Production hit 68.2. Like a lot of other sentiment indicators, this was the highest in so long it had to be something. For this particular index, it hadn’t seen better than 68 since way back in March 2010, back when the economy looked briefly like it...