Tag Archives: economy

Most Long-Term Trends Have Not Changed A lot has changed over the last 4 months since the COVID virus started to impact the global economy. Asia was infected first with China at ground zero. Their economy succumbed first with a large part of the country shut down to a degree that can only be accomplished in an authoritarian regime. The rest of Asia responded to the initial outbreak better than the Chinese (and most everywhere else we now know) and generally mitigated...

Jay Powell’s 2018 case for his economic “boom”, the one which was presumably behind his hawkish aggression, rested largely upon the unemployment rate alone. A curiously thin roster for a period of purported economic acceleration, one of the few sets joining that particular headline statistic in its optimism resides in the lower tiers of all statistics. The sentiment contained within the ISM’s PMI’s were at least in the same area as the unemployment rate, and...

What a difference a month makes. The euphoria clearly fading even as the positive numbers grow bigger still. The era of gigantic pluses is only reaching its prime, which might seem a touch pessimistic given the context. In terms of employment and the labor market, reaction to the Current Employment Situation (CES) report seems to indicate widespread recognition of this situation. And that means how there are actually two labor markets at the moment. Occupying the...

China’s PMI’s continue to impress despite the fact they continue to be wholly unimpressive. As with most economic numbers in today’s stock-focused obsessiveness, everything is judged solely by how much it “surprises.” Surprises who? Doesn’t matter; some faceless group of analysts and Economists whose short-term modeling has somehow become the very standard of performance. According to one such group, China’s official manufacturing index, the one calculated and...

After the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Tokyo with tales seemingly spun from some sci-fi disaster movie, all eyes turned to Japan. Cruisers had boarded the vacation vessel in Yokohama on January 20 already knowing that there was something bad going on in China’s Wuhan. The big ship would head out anyway for a fourteen-day tour of Vietnam, Taiwan, and, yes, China. Three days in, news reached the Diamond that the Communists had closed down the affected region....

Back in the middle of 2018, this kind of thing was at least straight forward and intuitive. If there was any confusion, it wasn’t related to the mechanics, rather most people just couldn’t handle the possibility this was real. Jay Powell said inflation, rate hikes, and accelerating growth. Absolutely hawkish across-the-board. And yet, all the way back in the middle of June 2018 the eurodollar curve started to say, hold on a minute. That’s the part which caused so...

I guess in some ways it’s a race against the clock. What the optimists are really saying is the equivalent of the old eighties neo-Keynesian notion of filling in the troughs. That’s what government spending and monetary “stimulus” intend to accomplish, to limit the downside in a bid to buy time. Time for what? The economy to heal on its own. Fill up the bathtub, so to speak, with artificial stimulus water (aggregate demand) until such time as the basin stops...

These numbers do seem epic, don’t they? It’s hard to ignore when you have the greatest percentage increase in the history of a major economic account. Just writing that sentence it’s difficult to deny the power of those words. Which is precisely the point: we already know ahead of time how the biggest economic holes in history are going to produce the biggest positives coming out of them. Whether that constitutes an actual recovery as opposed to the simplistic and...

The stock market has recovered most of its losses from the March COVID-19 induced sell-off and the enthusiasm with which stocks are being bought – and sold but mostly bought – could lead one to believe that the crisis is over, that the economy has completely or nearly completely recovered. Unfortunately, other markets do not support that notion nor does the available economic data. Of course, markets look forward and there is the possibility that stock market...

Just a quick update to add a little more data and color to my last Friday’s swap line criticism so hopefully you can better see how there is intentional activity behind them. Since a few people have asked, I’ll break them out with a little more detail. While the volume of swaps outstanding at the Fed has, in total, remained relatively constant (suspiciously, if you ask me), the underlying tenor of them has not. Meaning, there is purpose. It’s not like everyone...