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No bounce this week for purchase apps: Goldman Sachs Abandons Five of Six ‘Top Trade’ Calls for 2016 By Rachel Evans and Andrea WongFeb 9 (Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs to clients: whoops. Just six weeks into 2016, the New York-based bank has abandoned five of six recommended top trades for the year.The dollar versus a basket of euro and yen; yields on Italian bonds versus their German counterparts; U.S. inflationexpectations: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was wrong on all that and more.

And another bad one as sales are falling just as fast as inventories: Wholesale TradeHighlightsWholesale inventories fell an as-expected 0.1 percent in December with November revised 1 tenth lower to minus 0.4 percent. Wholesalers have been liquidating inventories as sales have been falling, down 0.3 percent in the latest month following a 1.3 percent sales decline in November. And they’ve been successful, keeping down the stock-to-sales ratio at 1.32 the last two reports which is still...

Looks to me like some a bit higher but some a bit lower as well, which tells me the ongoing policy of ‘excess’ discounts remains in place:Nothing here to indicate spending this year will be any better than last year:This is largely student loans:

As previously discussed, the numbers are showing that business is hiring more than output is increasing, which doesn’t seem to make sense to me. That is, it wouldn’t surprise me to see this reconciled by a drop in hiring, or a downward revision to employment in general. Productivity and CostsHighlightsFlat output and a rise in hours worked combined to sink fourth-quarter productivity to an annualized rate of minus 3.0 percent. The Econoday consensus was minus 1.8 percent with the low...

By Thornton (Tip) Parker Most MMT advocates probably took months to get comfortable with it.  But like a personal computer, one need not understand its innards to use its power.  The great power of MMT is its lesson that the federal government can create new dollars by running deficits to do things that should be done.  But the lesson is counterintuitive and will be rejected by voters unless it can be explained convincingly in a few minutes.  This paper offers five nuggets for explaining it...

This is being spun as a positive, when all I see is a chart showing the seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales peaked several months ago and is going down: U.S. Light Vehicle Sales at 17.46 million annual rate in January Based on an estimate from WardsAuto, light vehicle sales were at a 17.46 million SAAR in January.That is up about 5% from January 2015, and up about 1.4% from the 17.2 million annual sales rate last month.This graph shows the historical light vehicle sales from the BEA...

January 27th, 2016 On Thursday 21st January, Ann Pettifor appeared on Al Jazeera, along with Vicky Pryce, chief economic adviser at The Centre for Economic and Business Research, and Anastasia Nesvetailova, director of the City Political Economy Research Centre at City University in London. Presenter Nick Clark asked them to discuss why the global economic system lurches from one financial crisis to another, and whether another crisis is imminent. Watch the full discussion here. 

When the growth rate was even modestly increasing it made the news. Now that it’s decelerating not a word…

Possible bottom and now moving higher:This month’s negative reading doesn’t look so bad because the revised last month’s down so much…;) Philadelphia Fed Business Outlook SurveyHighlightsThe factory sector continues to slow this month though, in good news, the rate of contraction is flattening out. The Philly Fed’s general business conditions index for January is minus 3.5, a little better than the Econoday consensus for minus 4.0 and the best reading since all the back in August. The new...

January 14th, 2016 Figure 1 source: @SoberLook @SoberLook yesterday shared this chart of collapsing UK inflation expectations from Barclays Research UK, heightening fears of a deflationary spiral. As noted in an earlier blog, the year 2015 began with the Chancellor, George Osborne ‘welcoming’ the news that inflation had fallen in December to 0.5% – more than 1% below the official target. The FT declared that “this is almost certainly “good deflation”.   Jittery stock markets are now...