Inflation Worlds Apart, Same Monetary Failure
The US Producer Price Index declined 0.5% month-over-month in September, much farther than the 0.2% drop expected by economists (statisticians, really). With retail sales providing little positive...
View ArticleMind The Empty Malls Of Shanghai–Why Red Capitalism Is Plunging Into The Red
By Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge With China’s official headline GDP number printing at decade lows, the positive spin on the increasingly negative data out of China has been that this is all a part of...
View ArticleThe US Soft Patch Deepens——Weak CapEx Belies Escape Velocity Meme
A gauge of U.S. business investment plans fell for a second straight month in September, pointing to a sharp slowdown in economic growth and casting more doubts on whether the Federal Reserve will...
View ArticleNo Retail Slump——–Just A ‘Warm’ October
Janet Yellen and orthodox economists claim that the economy can only be gaining, and that word is taken, on faith, as if some updated, modern gold standard for meaning. No matter the contrary in actual...
View ArticleThe Next Monetary Frauds to Come Down the Turnpike
The general suspicion that something just ain’t right with the economy has become an obvious reality. Hope and optimism that somehow things will muddle along, or improve, are fading. You can see it,...
View ArticleGlobal Deflation Intensifies——Brazil’s Economy Is In Freefall
The problem with Brazil is that its central bank has done everything the monetary textbook requires of it. Setting aside that Banco itself is a literal mishmash of public and private interests (what...
View ArticleStill More Inventory
The only piece of the GDP revision to note is that the BEA is still having great difficulty estimating inventory. That isn’t surprising since businesses in this area are behaving far different than any...
View ArticleManufacturing Is Not 12%—–Unpacking The Deteriorating Trends Inside The GDP...
One of the problems with GDP as a statistical Swiss-Army knife for economic considerations is its very methodology. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t good and sound reasons for that kind of...
View ArticleThe Great Reset Has Begun—– Worried Spectrum of Altered Risks
Any ideas about junk bonds outperforming because of the booming economy confirmed by a monetary policy rate hike has been killed and buried. Conventionally, it was assumed that interest rates are not...
View ArticleThe Inescapable Trap of the ‘Dollar Short’——– Brazil Edition
For bond ratings agencies, finding a bottom is pretty much their job. In other words, they are supposed to map out and understand, as best as may be possible through regressions and equations, the...
View ArticleChina’s Ugly GDP Report—–Coping And Denial
China’s economic update for December and Q4 were uniformly ugly. GDP fell to 6.8% and 6.9% for the full year. Industrial production was back below 6%, estimated at just 5.9% and once more denying all...
View ArticleMore Recessionary Signals——Inventory Keeps Piling Up At All Levels
Despite continued cuts in production and supply chain activity, inventory through November persists in great imbalance. With December retail sales demonstrating a Christmas sales season only worse in...
View ArticleBeneath The Census Bureau’s Powdered Pig——January Retail Sales Capped Off A...
The January retail sales report demonstrates perfectly the nature of this whole recovery, but especially the last year or so when everything holding to the primary narrative boils down to the...
View ArticleIt’s Not Awesome—–Retail Slump Belies BLS’ Job Fantasies
When Janet Yellen testified to Congress last week, she was as usual careful with her words. Alan Greenspan once called it “mumbling with incoherence” but there is very little left to rambling in...
View ArticleWhat Pent-Up Demand——–Revolving Credit Exhibits Exhausted Consumer/End Of...
Revolving consumer credit turned upward in March last year, which signaled to economists that the true end of the Great Recession was at hand. The largest impediment to the monetary version of the...
View ArticleWhat ‘Escape Velocity’……..Retail Spending Remains Punk
The fiscal year for retailers ended in January with nothing like what it was supposed to be. Still, as always, the suggestions remained that a rebound in consumerism would be before too long. If it...
View ArticleDubious Retail Jobs Surge——The BLS Is Smoking Something
Going only from the conventional interpretation of the optimistic 242,000 in payroll gains Friday, it is still remarkable how more than one-fifth of those purported job creations in February were due...
View ArticleNo Oil Rebound, No NFIB Optimism, No Fed Rescue
“3 Things” is a weekly post of thoughts I am pondering, usually contrarian, with respect to the markets, economy or portfolio management. Comments and thoughts are always welcome via email, Twitter,...
View ArticleThe China Boom Grinds Ever Slower——-January/February Data Update
Industrial production for the combined January/February period in China fell to just 5.4%, matching the lowest growth rate of the past fourteen years. Only the January/February 2002 IP rate was lower,...
View ArticleThe Evidence Piles Up—–Japan’s Economy Keeps Shrinking, Abenomics An Abject...
Household spending in February 2016 in Japan rose year-over-year for the first time in six months. That was the sum total of any good economic news for the monetary-stricken economy, and it doesn’t...
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