Analysis Topic: Economic Trends Analysis
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
U.S. Jobs Optimism Bias Squared / Economics / Employment
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Oh yeah, sure, optimism is oozing from every single one of America’s pores. Or so they’ll have you believe. 281,000 new jobs says the ADP report, most since December 2012. Of which small business added 117,000 and medium sized business 115,000. And the media are just besides themselves with joy. Shame that the markets react lukewarm at best. Then again, they do better the worse the news gets, all they reflect anymore these days is the level of distortion and convolution that they obey (or is that the other way around?).
Tuesday, July 01, 2014
How Government Forces the Poor Into Black Markets / Economics / Government Intervention
By: MISES
Peter St. Onge writes: From the left we often see tension between those who want to help the poor, and those who want to help the government. One recent example of this is the proposal to ban cash forwarded by Harvard’s Ken Rogoff.
The gist of Rogoff’s beef with cash is that cash fuels the black market, and it makes it harder for the government to push negative nominal interest rates. In both cases, Rogoff doesn’t even get that he’s describing benefits of cash, not problems to be solved.
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Monday, June 30, 2014
Japan Says Konnichiwa to Economic Stagflation / Economics / Stagflation
By: Michael_Pento
More than twenty years after its infamous real estate and equity bubble burst, Japan has been plagued by economic malaise, an ailment most main stream economists have attributed to something they call a deflationary death spiral. As one lost decade turned into two, and now well into number three, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has vowed to remedy this deflationary flu with an enormous dose of inflation.
Monday, June 30, 2014
U.S. Debt - If We Get Even The Simplest Things Wrong .. / Economics / US Debt
By: Raul_I_Meijer
If we get even the simplest things wrong, and we do it on a consistent basis, because we lack the tools to look beyond our noses, then what chance do we have of getting the bigger and harder things right? A point I’ve often belabored, and will again a thousand times because it’s the very essence of what we get wrong, is growth, or rather our myopic relationship with it.
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Shinzo Abe and the Japanese Economy Three Magic Arrows / Economics / Japan Economy
By: MISES
Andy Sirkis writes: Despite claims to the contrary in the mass media, Japan’s economy is continuing to suffer mightily under the leadership of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo. Abe is from a famous family and he’s a convincing talker, so he was able to bamboozle people into believing that he could make Japan prosper with his three arrows. These metaphorical arrows stand for “monetary stimulus,” “fiscal stimulus,” and “structural reform.”
Saturday, June 28, 2014
A Second Quarter U.S. GDP Bounce-Back May Not Be Bullish / Economics / US Economy
By: Sy_Harding
No one, or at least hardly anyone, expects the U.S. economy is sliding into a recession, which would require two straight quarters of negative growth.
The sharp plunge in first quarter GDP, to negative 2.9%, should reverse to a positive reading of some degree in the second quarter. You get no argument from me on that score.
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Friday, June 27, 2014
U.S. GDP: Is the Economic Sky Falling? / Economics / US Economy
By: Investment_U
Tom Sandford writes: The U.S. economy just came out on top of one of the biggest financial upsets in decades, but you might not know it from the latest report on America’s gross domestic product (GDP).
According to the U.S. Commerce Department, GDP nosedived by 2.9% during the first quarter of 2014. It also set the record for the worst first-quarter performance in five years. Naturally, the news has some investors shaking in their boots.
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Friday, June 27, 2014
There Are No – Financial – Black Swans / Economics / US Economy
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Oh Japan, what are you doing, where are you going? As Japanese consumer prices rose 3.4% in May (and I do wish people would stop calling this inflation, it is not and never will be), consumer spending was down -8.9% (!). That is from a year earlier, so it has nothing to do with the April 1 tax hike! It’s an insane number when you think about it, and it’s the direct result of Abenomics tightening the thumb screws. With the population having seen their savings collapse, their wages move way down, and now rising prices for food and other basics. While the government and central bank are spending with unparalleled abandon, and pension funds are moving into riskier assets, away from government bonds, which have that same central bank as their only buyer left. Is it also going to purchase all the bonds the pensions funds will bring into the market? Frankly, how can it not?
Friday, June 27, 2014
No Inflation ...Thanks to ObamaCare / Economics / Inflation
By: EconMatters
Healthcare Data Skewed
On Thursday the Personal Income and Outlays Report came out also known as the spending report and just like yesterday`s GDP downward revision the Healthcare component is playing havoc with the overall numbers, and it is pretty obvious due to the newly enacted Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare.
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Thursday, June 26, 2014
I Give You: The GDP of Sillyland / Economics / Economic Statistics
By: Raul_I_Meijer
I had seen the reports on Italy and Britain preparing to add heroin and hookers to their GDP, but I had put that down to some kind of desperate quirkiness. Now, though, I heard today that this is actually due to an EU directive, and the number crunchers at Eurostat demand countries obey this newfound accounting magic trick.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
The Fed Misrepresenting Inflation to Justify Inept Policy / Economics / Inflation
By: EconMatters
Government Data is useless
The final GDP calculation came out on Wednesday, and we have several takeaways from this latest revision. First of all government reporting data is all over the place, and not in a good way. I have no confidence that any of these numbers are actually right, and second with an ever changing economy, most of these data gathering tools are obsolete at best. The GDP number has now become a complete farce, the components used to calculate growth are so useless that we literally could have a plus 7% GDP quarter, and it mean absolutely nothing regarding the real health of the US economy!
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Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Economic Gross Output: J.M. Keynes versus J.-B. Say / Economics / Economic Statistics
By: Steve_H_Hanke
In late April of this year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it would start reporting a new data series as part of the U.S. national income accounts. In addition to gross domestic product (GDP), the BEA will start reporting gross output (GO). This announcement went virtually unnoticed and unreported — an unfortunate, but not uncommon, oversight on the part of the financial press. Yes, GO represents a significant breakthrough.
Monday, June 23, 2014
U.S. Fed’s “Noisy” Inflation Fantasy / Economics / Inflation
By: Michael_Pento
The Fed wants investors to be as unconcerned as the central bank is about inflation. Even though year over year consumer price inflation is above its target, the Fed chose in its latest press conference to claim the 2.1 percent YOY increase in prices paid merely represented “noisy” readings in the inflation gauge. However, the truth is that rising prices are a direct result of years’ worth of zero percent interest rates and $3.5 trillion in money printing provided courtesy of both Banana Ben Bernanke and the Counterfeiting Queen, Janet Yellen.
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Friday, June 20, 2014
Euro-zone Blaming Deflation / Economics / Euro-Zone
By: Alasdair_Macleod
With the Eurozone going to the extreme of negative interest rates and the IMF belatedly revising downwards their expectations of US economic growth, deflation is now the favoured buzzword. It is time to untangle myth from reality and put deflation in context.
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Friday, June 20, 2014
Global Drag Threatens Worst U.S. Export Performance in Over 60 Years / Economics / US Economy
By: F_F_Wiley
Ever since an über-strong U.S. dollar crushed the export sector in the mid-1980s, the U.S. economy hasn’t looked quite the same.
Exports picked up towards the end of the decade, helped along by the G-7’s historic 1985 powwow at New York’s Plaza Hotel, which led to a coordinated effort to slam back the dollar. Nonetheless, some export industries never fully recovered.
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Friday, June 20, 2014
U.S. Economy Is Still in the High-Danger Zone / Economics / US Economy
By: Don_Miller
I hate being the bearer of bad news.
I remember the one and only time in my life I agreed to umpire a Little League game behind the plate. My youngest son was on the mound, and his older brother came to bat. The count went to 3-2, and I realized I had a huge knot in my stomach.
I said to myself, “God, please let him swing and hit the ball!” And he did. I don’t even recall where it went; I was just thankful I didn’t have to make a call that would have meant bad news for one of them.
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Thursday, June 19, 2014
The Fed Just Lost Any Shred of Credibility on Inflation / Economics / Inflation
By: EconMatters
Those High Chicken Prices are just Noise – Tell that to the Cashier
The Fed today in their press conference lost any credibility on a number of issues, and it really goes to show that they have no clue what they are doing at this point. First they called the overheating inflation in the economy Noise, yes you heard right NOISE which is now showing up even in the watered down indexes used to track it by the Fed, and already above their target of 2% on a year over year basis and rising, (wait until you see the next two month`s CPI reports on a spike in gasoline prices as we enter the summer driving season).
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Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Even the Feds Admit Minimum Wages Cause Unemployment / Economics / Wages
By: MISES
Nicholas Freiling writes: Minimum wage doesn’t apply to everyone.
When Congress first established minimum wage in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, it left a loophole for businesses that employ people with disabilities.
Read full article... Read full article...The Secretary, to the extent necessary to prevent curtailment of opportunities for employment, shall by regulation or order provide for the employment, under special certificates, of individuals ... whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury, at wages which are lower than the minimum wage.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
A Crash Is the Economic System Fixing Itself / Economics / Financial Crash
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Just a bunch of numbers Reuters published today. Read and weep. While remembering that this spring, after that horrible winter that threw the recovery so terribly off course, would see pent-up demand go crazy. That after the Q1 GDP growth, which has by now been revised to -2% after initially having been predicted to be in the 3%+ range, Q2 would certainly, according to pundits, economists and government agencies, top 3%, if not more. We already know for a fact that’s not going to happen. Unless the US grows faster in June than China did in its heyday.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
U.S. Unemployment - They’re Lying To Us / Economics / Unemployment
By: John_Rubino
One of the frustrating things about the monthly US jobs report is the way everyone focuses on the wrong number. The headline says “unemployment falls…” which sounds great, while the small print, which almost no one seems to read, explains that most of the improvement is due to people dropping out of the labor force. The number of new jobs created is frequently small or negative.
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