It was supposed to be the Chinese government who was going to rescue the global economy. Once the rationalizations ended and officials around the world realized there was serious economic weakness building at the end of 2018 instead of a globally synchronized inflationary recovery, the green shoots of 2019 were going to be in one […]
This green shoot didn’t wilt so much as it exploded into a fireball.
The way I look at the global economy, there are basically five different zones. The first is the US and the second is Europe. China might be third on this list but often second if not first in terms of what’s driving marginal changes. In behind those is Japan, not what it once was but […]
With the Democratic Party staging the first of its national debates, The New York Times found time to embed a reporter amongst a group of Trump voters in the swing state of Michigan. Situated to watch the show, and given how the election of 2016 turned out, the Rust Belt is on the minds of […]
In 2005, Ben Bernanke kicked up quite a bit of controversy, or what qualifies as drama in the dry space of top-level Economics. It was Alan Greenspan who really started the conversation, practically begging for someone to offer an answer. Long-term interest rates were not behaving the way they were supposed to; the maestro’s true […]
ACT Research, the leading publisher of commercial vehicle industry data in North America, reported last week that freight rates in for-hire trucking had declined in May.
I thought this one needed a separate notation, though the same subject as the previous article. We’re still talking about the foreign repo pool, or monetary policy’s original reverse repo. It’s basically a way for overseas official governments and central banks to tell the Fed’s New York branch they’re uncomfortable with the dollar condition. How […]
It’s difficult a lot of times to easily and succinctly describe what’s going on inside a monetary system that; 1. Spans the entire world, easily jumping across if not erasing geographical boundaries; 2. Is located in the shadows, leaving us with no direct data or statistics; 3. Often works in a dizzying array of complexities. […]
In order for rate cuts to be insurance for a boom to continue, there first has to be a boom able to be continued. The FOMC meeting yesterday didn’t directly kill the idea, but that’s actually what’s coming up in the latest projections. This is why there’s been so much attention focused on inflation. The […]
In early January, much of the world was dazed and confused. What the hell just happened? Two weeks before, in the middle of December 2018, Jay Powell stood in front of the microphones confidently declaring his rate hikes justified by an extremely strong economy. Yet, even the stock market had turned against him. When the […]
