If last month’s payroll report was declared to be strong at +128k, then what would that make this month’s +266k? Epic? Heroic?
The real question, though, is whether the business cycle approach means anything in this day and age. I don’t think it does, and that’s a big part of why there’s so much confusion about both cause and effect.
For US importers, October is their month.
The evidence continues to pile up for increasing slack in the US economy.
Back in April, while she was quietly jockeying to make sure her name was placed at the top of the list to succeed Mario Draghi at the ECB, Christine Lagarde detoured into the topic of central bank independence. At a joint press conference held with the Governor of the Reserve Bank of South Africa, Lesetja […]
They absolutely loved the China PMI numbers, after having taken no note of Japan’s IP, dismissed Markit’s slightly higher revisions, and then totally hated the ISM’s Manufacturing PMI. That last one was supposed to join the others in moving substantially upward, contributing to widespread hopes all recession fears have been extinguished even this late into […]
The weekend began with pure joy over PMI’s before it ended in deep disappointment early Monday…over a PMI. It started in China. That country’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released its November 2019 numbers for manufacturing and non-manufacturing sentiment. According to the government’s calculations, the gauge for manufacturing ticked back above 50 last month for […]
What everyone wants to know is, what does this downshift really mean? Did the US economy simply revert to its (already too low) mean potential after a minor reflation high last year? Or is it transiting from reflation into a weaker possibly more dangerous state beyond the simply lackluster?
If you thought the Western media was liberal with the word “strong” (经济强劲, I believe) you haven’t read a China National Bureau of Statistics press release.
If you pay close enough attention you can actually see how they are just making things up as they go.
