Tag Archives: The United States

The English language headline for China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ press release on November 2018’s Big 3 was, National Economy Maintained Stable and Sound Momentum of Development in November. For those who, as noted yesterday, are wishing China’s economy bad news so as to lead to the supposed good news of a coordinated “stimulus” response this was itself a bad news/good news situation. If the Communist State...

Capital garners the gains, and labor’s share continues eroding. That’s the story of the 21st century. The middle class, virtually by definition, is not prepared for downward mobility. A systemic, semi-permanent decline in the standard of living isn’t part of the implicit social contract that’s been internalized by the middle class virtually everywhere:living standards are only supposed to rise. Any decline is...

There is some hope among those viewing bad news as good news. In China, where alarms are currently sounding the loudest, next week begins the plenary session for the State Council and its working groups. For several days, Communist authorities will weigh all the relevant factors, as they see them, and will then come up with the broad strokes for economic policy in the coming year (2019). We won’t know the full details...

If there is one thing Ben Bernanke got right, it was this. In 2009 during the worst of the worst monetary crisis in four generations, the Federal Reserve’s Chairman was asked in front of Congress if we all should be worried about zombies. Senator Bob Corker wasn’t talking about the literal undead, rather a scenario much like Japan where the financial system entered a period of sustained agony – leading to the same in...

The value of declaring the entire nation in or out of recession is limited. Recessions are typically only visible to statisticians long after the fact, but they are often visible in real time on the ground: business volume drops, people stop buying houses and vehicles, restaurants that were jammed are suddenly sepulchral and so on. There are well-known canaries in the coal mine in terms of indicators. These include...

[embedded content] Economic thoughts and analysis from Alhambra Investments CEO Joe Calhoun. Related posts: Monthly Macro Monitor – October 2018 (VIDEO) Monthly Macro Monitor – September 2018 Monthly Macro Monitor – August Monthly Macro Monitor – November 2018 Monthly Macro Monitor – October 2018 Monthly Macro Monitor – August 2018 Monthly Macro...

There’s no sign of inflation, markets are unsettled, and now new economic data keeps confirming that dark side. Forget each month, every day there is something else suggesting a slowdown. That much had been evident across much of the global economy, but this is now different. The US has apparently been infected, too, not that that is any surprise. That’s how these things go. Global synchronized growth, decoupling,...

Now that the slowdown is being absorbed and even talked about openly, it will require a period of heavy CYA. This part is, or at least it has been at each of the past downturns, quite easy for its practitioners. It was all so “unexpected”, you see. Nobody could have seen it coming, therefore it just showed up out of nowhere unpredictably spoiling the heretofore unbreakable, incorruptible boom everyone was talking about...

What’s scarce in a world awash in free content and nearly infinite entertainment content? After 3,701 posts (from May 2005 to the present), here are my observations of the Alternative Media from the muddy trenches. It’s increasingly difficult to make a living creating content outside the corporate matrix. The share of advert revenues paid to content creators / publishers has declined precipitously, shadow banning has...

The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion. We can summarize the current era in one sentence: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell. Jean-Claude Juncker’s famous quote captures the essence of the era: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might...