Tag Archives: financial cycle

I have been reporting for months that the indicator we should all be monitoring is Real Gross Private Domestic Investment.... Forbes — Pragmatic EconomicsIs Falling Investment Spending The Last Nail In The Coffin? John T. Harvey | Professor of Economics, Texas Christian University

I saw a high profile comment to the effect that the business cycle was abolished recently. Since I will be plugging a book on recessions shortly, that represents a risk to my business plans. I do not wish to go through what exactly was said elsewhere (mainly because I did not go through the details of the argument), but just give my spin on the idea. If we stick enough qualifications into how we express ourselves, it is not that controversial an opinion.... Bond Economics End Of...

Now that new home sales have reached a new cycle high (in June), I'd like to update a couple of graphs in a previous post (most of this from an earlier post). For the economy, what we should be focused on are single family starts and new home sales. As I noted in Investment and Recessions "New Home Sales appears to be an excellent leading indicator, and currently new home sales (and housing starts) are up solidly year-over-year, and this suggests there is no recession in sight."… Although...

The focus of my upcoming book is on recession forecasting, and not policy responses towards recessions. However, I expect that this is a subject of interest to many of my readers, so I will offer a brief outline of some of the literature. (Note: this is an unedited first draft of a section from my manuscript book on recessions. For a typical standalone article, it is too long. However, I do not want to spend time stripping out information that should appear in a book. I could have split it...

Real estate -- particularly residential real estate -- is an extremely important factor when discussing recessions in the modern era. To a certain extent, real estate is where economic theory goes to die. One possibility is that the theory was largely developed when the norms in real estate investment were conservative, so attention was moved to the industrial sector. However, the herd tendencies in the housing market may now overwhelm the industrial cycle. (This article is a set of notes...

Hyman Minsky quote.Lars P. Syll’s BlogWhat is missing in Keynes’ General Theory Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

One often encounters assertions that recessions are the result of an excess demand for money (or some variant), based on various equilibrium arguments. Although one could superficially interpret recessions in such a fashion, the issue is that this interpretation does not help analyse the business cycle. In other words, it is a non-falsifiable statement that offers no useful information. In my view, discussions involving "money" or "safe assets" provide us an example regarding the limited...

Forecast.Credit Writedowns As the Fed meets, expect expansion through 2018, but problems thereafterEdward Harrison

Review and critique of the latest OECD World Economic Outlook, from a Marxian POV. Useful. The key for me, as readers of this blog know, is what is happening to the profitability of capital in the major economies. If profitability is rising, then corporate investment and economic growth will follow – but also vice versa. But if profitability and profits are falling, debt accumulated will become a major burden. Eventually the zombies will start to go bankrupt, spreading across sectors and...

Over the weekend, DB's credit strategist Aleksandar Kocic discussed what Minsky Dynamics for the "New Normal" look like based on a matrix that charted the various progressions of Leverage vs Volatility, with four possible end states. However, since that graphic explanation proved too problematic for some, another Deutsche macro analyst, Alan Ruskin, released a far simpler representation of the current (and historical) Minsky cycle, which compartmentalizes the world's various assets in their...