Bonds Keep Winning Their Battle With Economists January 04, 2019

The stock market was rocked by another piece of bad news, and that was only the beginning. Key NASDAQ darling, one of the so-called FANGs, Apple announced quarterly earnings that included a rare cut to its sales forecast. It unleashed a flash crash y...

It's All Coming Apart At the Seams As the Errors Multiply January 11, 2019

The unemployment rate fell within the range Economists have defined for full employment years ago. In early 2015, in fact. All the most sophisticated econometric models ever produced declared the moment had arrived, full and complete recovery at long...

Global Economy Is About to Find Out What Comes After Sadness January 18, 2019

It was by their recent standards a hugely successful campaign for the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League. Before this last season, the lovable losers had only managed a single victory out of their previous thirty-five games. Failing to ...

The Global Economy Is Set to Find Out What Comes After Sadness January 18, 2019

It was by their recent standards a hugely successful campaign for the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League. Before this last season, the lovable losers had only managed a single victory out of their previous thirty-five games. Failing to ...

Global Economy Moved Past Sputtering, and Into Downturn January 25, 2019

The bad economic news has spread, its pace quickening. China reported its worst quarterly growth in decades. Trade is contracting. Germany’s industry is declining at a rate not seen since Europe’s last recession. Even Canada is leading the way forwar...

It Is Always Everything Else But the One Thing That's Wrong February 01, 2019

The world doesn’t seem to realize it yet, but Japan has crept ever closer even on the islands. Last year at this time, Bank of Japan officials were openly talking about finally exiting from QQE and maybe even ZIRP. Inflation was on the rise, they bel...

The Powell Party Is Just Getting Started, and It's the Opposite of Festive February 08, 2019

Why wasn’t it Christmas? Everything we had ever been taught pointed to the celebration. One prominent stock market analyst said, “we’re having champagne and cookies.” That was the way share prices reacted globally. The Dow jumped 330 points, while th...

The Bond Market Stopped Being Polite Last December February 15, 2019

It almost rises to the level of a paradox. Whenever things go wrong, you can be sure officials will be quick to blame speculators. At the end of last October, for example, the People’s Bank of China began a series of stepped up bill auctions. The cou...

It Can't Die of Old Age If It's Not 'Recovery' to Begin With February 22, 2019

On her last day as Chairman, Janet Yellen allowed CBS News reporter Rita Braver to follow her around saying goodbye and reminiscing. It was February 1, 2018, by every mainstream account a good time to be sailing off into the sunset. Federal Reserve o...

It Can't Die of Old Age If It's Not a 'Recovery' To Begin With February 22, 2019

On her last day as Chairman, Janet Yellen allowed CBS News reporter Rita Braver to follow her around saying goodbye and reminiscing. It was February 1, 2018, by every mainstream account a good time to be sailing off into the sunset. Federal Reserve o...

Are the Great Depression and the Last 11 Years Comparable? March 01, 2019

Due to the federal government shutdown in December and January, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) wasn’t able to provide a preliminary estimate of US GDP for the fourth quarter of 2018. Trying to catch up, agency statisticians have had to scrambl...

The World Presumes Central Bankers Get It. They Don't. March 08, 2019

It most definitely is a liquidity trap, just not the one they conceive. What lost Japan three decades of economic growth was a gargantuan mistake about its own monetary system, and where its central bank fits into it. Western authorities in our curre...

China Is At the Forefront of a Global Economic Reverse March 15, 2019

It was a crossroads for modern China. As its de facto leader since 1978, Deng Xiaoping had introduced serious reforms. These had begun to sputter toward the later 1980’s. Then came Tiananmen Square and a growing crackdown. Authoritarian politics was ...

The Fed Threw In the Towel On the 'Boom,' Doesn't Know Why March 22, 2019

And so, just like that, the policy cycle is now over. In terms of time, it took far longer than the last one. Alan Greenspan’s Fed, finished up under Ben Bernanke, packed 17 successive 25 bps “rate hikes” into 501 trading sessions. Those begun under ...

Loading ...