Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Will INSTEX Replace SWIFT Bank Exchange? Probably not, but reportedly a “White House insider” is afraid it might. Instex is the new exchange created by UK, France, and Germany, to be based i Paris and run by a German banker, to get around US sanctions against Iran.  Apparently it will sell Iran humaanitarian goods such as pharmacueticaals and food not subject to the sanctions, with those being paid for with Iranian petroleum that will then get sold...

February short leading data starts out decent We’ve had two pieces of forward looking data in the last week (in addition to the leading bits in the employment report). The first was the ISM manufacturing index: Contrary to my expectations, the most leading new orders component rebounded sharply, up to 58.2. This is closer to its “hot” readings of mid-2018 than to its tepid 51.3 in December. The second was motor vehicle sales. After housing, this is...

“Just doesn’t add up'” “I’m not sure I follow the arithmetic here.” “It’s all down to the numbers – something the article avoids and so is just pie-in-the-sky.” “That clearly does not add up.” “If you produce X in 30 hours you will produce > X in 40 – unless you are just sitting on your arse for the extra 10 hours.” “If you work 40 hours your total output will be higher than if you work 30 hours – unless you are actually destroying output in those...

by New Deal democrat Q4 Senior Loan Officer Survey says … The Senior Loan Officer Survey is one of my list of long leading indicators. The Q4 report came out yesterday. The news wasn’t good. This post is up at Seeking Alpha. Meanwhile, since the dates for publication of neither housing permits nor Q4 GDP were announced last week, I am going to go ahead and put up a preliminary forecast for the second half of this year sometime this week....

How To Go After The US Wealthy Reagan Style Ah yes, this is going to be another one of those ironic posts about what a big leftist liberal Ronald Reagan was compared to the current GOP gang in charge of so many of our policies, especially our tax policies.  Certainlly the image of Reagan is one who cut taxes for the high income wealthy, and in general that is the case.  But there were a few items going the other way, and again, compared to current...

UPDATE: Foxconn now says that it will indeed still build a factory, citing a conversation between CEO Terry Gou and Trump (h/t commenter Joel at Angry Bear). This is certainly clear as mud. As others have pointed out, several promised investments from Foxconn have failed to materialize at anywhere near the scale promised, including in Brazil, Pennsylvania, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India. So I am going to remain skeptical on what was a terrible deal in the...

Leading scenes from the employment report not so positive I seem to have been the only person to pick up on the weakness in the underlying leading aspects of last Friday’s jobs report. While the number of job gains was great, and that average wages for non-managerial workers had their second best showing, at 3.4%, of the entire expansion, just behind last month’s 3.5%, the leading aspects of the report, with one exception, were not so positive. Let’s...

The End Of The End Of The Cold War It is a sign of how wacko things hve gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply beeen buried in the news by all the juffing and puffing over Trump’s shutdown ending and these reveleations about VA Governor Northam.  This would be decidion by the US on Feb. 1 to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty with Russia, followed by Russia’s doing so as well shortly thereafter. ...

January jobs report: a tale of two almost diametrically opposed components HEADLINES: +304,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose 0.1% from 3.9% to 4.0% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.5% from 7.6% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: declined -73,000 from 5.327 million to 5.254 million Part time for economic reasons: rose +490,000 from...

Advance reading of January manufacturing supports further slowdown I have been using an average of the five regional Fed new orders indexes to forecast the direction of the ISM manufacturing new orders index, and indirectly manufacturing production.  Now that all five regional Fed indexes have been reported, here’s a comparison of the regional Fed averages (left) and ISM new orders (right) for all of 2018 plus this month: 2018 JAN   15   65.4 FEB   20...