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Nothing here looking encouraging: Inventories remain elevated: Credit decelerating here as well:

Also decelerating in line with deceleration of bank auto lending. One by one the data releases seem to be confirming the last 6 month’s rapid deceleration of bank lending: Highlights The consumer remains disengaged based on vehicle sales where weakness extended into June, at a 16.5 million annualized rate vs what were modest expectations for 16.6 million and against 16.7 million in May. North American-made sales edged up to 13.1 million from 13.0 million though the gain is...

This paper uses hysteresis to develop the concept of policy lock-in and lock-out. Policy changes may near-irrevocably change the economy’s structure, thereby changing the distribution of wealth, income and power. That may lock-in policy by changing the political equilibrium. Exit costs that block policy reversals also cause lock-in. Conventional thinking treats policy as a dial [...]

As per the chart, decelerating in line with the deceleration in real estate related bank lending: Highlights Spring 2017 was not the greatest for the nation’s housing sector where data have been mixed at best. Permits have been down and spending data are flat to down with construction spending unchanged in May which hits the very lowest estimate in Econoday’s consensus range. And the weakness is in residential spending, down 0.6 percent overall and including declines for...

First, let’s look at total bank credit. On this chart you can see that the cumulative growth of bank credit is more than $400 billion less than it would have been if it hadn’t slowed down. That is, last year’s economy was supported by that much more growth of bank credit than this year’s economy as the annual rate of growth has slowed from over 8% to about 4%: We’ve most recently had a few weeks of increase. A hopeful sign but the annual growth rate is still way down from...

I used to live in Little Rock,  so waking up this morning to the news of the shooting in Little Rock was a bit of a shock.  Fortunately, the expletive expletive who did the shooting was a bad shot and nobody got killed. I don’t even know how to comment on this, though, so I’m going to just to put it up… This is a screenshot I just took from the night club’s website which shows the act that was performing last night. I guess what with the events of the last...

A just-released paper by the Behavioral Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) looks at hiring processes in the Australian Public Service Commission. Here’s the summary: This study assessed whether women and minorities are discriminated against in the early stages of the recruitment process for senior positions in the APS, while also testing the impact of implementing a ‘blind’ or de-identified approach to reviewing candidates. Over 2,100 public...

Looks to me like this opens the door to fiscal relaxation!!! “In an economy with its own fiat currency, the monetary authority and the fiscal authority can ensure that public debt denominated in the national fiat currency is non-defaultable, i.e. maturing government bonds are convertible into currency at par. With this arrangement in place, fiscal policy can focus on business cycle stabilisation when monetary policy hits the lower bound constraint. However, the fiscal...