Tag Archives: GDP

As the calendar turned to September, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidelines expanding and extending existing moratoriums previously put in place to stop evictions during the pandemic. Families affected by COVID either through the disease or as a result of job loss due to the coronavirus have been protected from landowner actions including eviction as a final means to reclaim rental properties from non-conforming tenants. There...

A perpetual motion machine is impossible, but what about a perpetual inflation machine? This is supposed to be the printing press and central banks are, they like to say, putting it to good and heavy use. But never the inflation by which to confirm it. So round and round we go. The printing press necessary to bring about consumer price acceleration, only the lack of consumer price acceleration dictates the need for more of the printing press. It never ends. If you...

March 15 was when it all began to come down. Not the stock market; that had been in freefall already, beset by the rolling destruction of fire sale liquidations emanating out of the repo market (collateral side first). No matter what the Federal Reserve did or announced, there was no stopping the runaway devastation. It wasn’t until the middle of March that the first major shutdown orders began to appear – on Twitter feeds – and these weren’t the total lockdowns...

Forward-looking data is starting to trickle in. Germany has been a main area of interest for us right from the beginning, and by beginning I mean Euro$ #4 rather than just COVID-19. What has happened to the German economy has ended up happening everywhere else, a true bellwether especially manufacturing and industry. The latest sentiment figures from ZEW as well as IFO are sobering. Taking the former first, it had been quite buoyant last year on the false...

The coronavirus began during December, but in its early stages no one knew a thing about it. It wasn’t until January 1 that health authorities in China closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after initially determining some wild animals sold there might have been the source of a pneumonia-like outbreak. On January 5, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued a statement saying it wasn’t SARS or MERS, and that the spreading disease would be probed. In other...

Headline GDP growth during the fourth quarter of 2019 was 2.05849% (continuously compounded annual rate), slightly lower than the (revised) 2.08169% during Q3. For the year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) puts total real output at $19.07 trillion, or annual growth of 2.33% and down from 2.93% in 2018. Last year was weaker than 2017, the second lowest out of the six since 2013. And that’s where the good news ends. Eurodollar Disruption, Peaks &...

The week ahead is arguably the most important here at the start of 2020. The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England meet. The US and the eurozone report initial estimates of Q4 19 GDP. The eurozone also reports its preliminary estimate of January CPI. China returns from the extended Lunar New Year celebration and reports its official PMI. Japan will report December retail sales and industrial production. These data points will provide insight into the state of the...

Chinese Industrial Production accelerated further in December 2019, rising 6.9% year-over-year according to today’s estimates from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). That was a full percentage point above consensus. IP had bottomed out right in August at a record low 4.4%, and then, just as this wave of renewed optimism swept the world, it has rebounded alongside it. Rather than suggest the global economy is picking up, or ended last year in a “good...

Since I advertised the release last week, here’s Mexico’s update to Industrial Production in November 2019. The level of production was estimated to have fallen by 1.8% from November 2018. It was up marginally on a seasonally-adjusted basis from its low in October. That doesn’t sound like much, -1.8%, but apart from recent months this would’ve been the third worst result since 2009. Mexico has rarely experienced that kind of seemingly mild contraction. It signals...

October 2017 continues to show up as the most crucial month across a wide range of global economic data. In the mainstream telling, it should have been a very good thing, a hugely positive inflection. That was the time of true inflation hysteria around the globe, though it was always presented as a rationally-determined base case rather than the unsupported madness it really was. That was the month the real recovery was supposed to have started. Instead, we can...