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 […]
In real life you can always tell when someone has something to hide when they get really evasive in their answers. And boy was Jay Powell evasive in his press conference yesterday. […]
Monetary policy can be implemented through outright purchases or sales of securities, which permanently changes the size of the Federal Reserve’s System Open Market Account (SOMA) portfolio.
All of these guarantees and redundancies are as illusory as the “unsinkable” technologies of the Titanic.
While China’s coronavirus outbreak dominates Western media attention, the Chinese economy has been off for its Golden Week New Year celebrations. Unfortunate timing, to say the least. While global markets have been digesting the latest developments, domestic markets in China have been closed. Nobody really knows how they will reopen on Monday. As a consequence, […]
There he was, the Fed Chairman stumbling through a question about headwinds and transitory factors. No, not Jay Powell in January 2020, this was Ben Bernanke in June 2011. The Fed had just downgraded its recovery forecasts (again) and some in the media weren’t getting it. After all, QE2. It was this enormously powerful monetary […]
Ignored but true: All the projections about coming growth as a result of tax cuts have been proven wrong. All the promises that tax cuts would pay for themselves: Wrong. All the […]
It’s a palpable impatience. Having learned absolutely nothing from the most recent German example, there’s this pervasive belief that if the economy hasn’t fallen apart by now it must be going the other way. The right way. Those are the only two options for mainstream analysis (which means it isn’t analysis). You can see it […]
Everyone expecting a quick resolution to the epidemic and a rapid return to pre-epidemic conditions would be well-served by looking beyond first-order effects.While the media naturally focuses on the immediate effects of the coronavirus epidemic, …
Monetary policy can be implemented through outright purchases or sales of securities, which permanently changes the size of the Federal Reserve’s System Open Market Account (SOMA) portfolio.