Saturday, December 23, 2017

Weekly Indicators for December 18 - 22 at XE.com

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 - by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is  up at XE.com . There is what passes for turmoil in my dry and nerdy world among ...
Friday, December 22, 2017

Personal spending and new home sales: restrain your enthusiasm!

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 - by New Deal democrat We got the last two significant data points of the year this morning: personal spending and new home sales...

The bond yield conundrum: 100 years of spreads

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  - by New Deal democrat As I mentioned the other day, we have data going back nearly 100 years on the relationships between short a...
Thursday, December 21, 2017

Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low?

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A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason ...
Wednesday, December 20, 2017

How interest rates and the demographic tailwind ended the housing slowdown of 2017

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 - by New Deal democrat Yesterday's report on housing permits and starts confirms that the housing slowdown of 2017 is over. Based ...

Five Key Graphs for 2018

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This is up over at XE.com
Tuesday, December 19, 2017

The bond yield conundrum revisited: narrowing corporate spreads vs. a flattening Treasury yield curve

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 - by New Deal democrat Two introductory notes: first of all, next week is the last week of the year including the Christmas holiday...
Monday, December 18, 2017

Monday Morning Bond Market Round-Up

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The Baa-10-year treasury spread (top chart) is at a 10-year low.  This is a leading indicator.  The AAA-10-year spread (bottom ...
Sunday, December 17, 2017

My Columns Are Up at XE.com

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International Economic Week in Review US Economic Week in Review
Saturday, December 16, 2017

Weekly Indicators for December 11 - 15 at XE.com

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 - by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is  up at XE.com . A whirlpool of crosscurrents among the long leading indicators has...

Why Did 30 and 90 Day Commercial Paper Spreads Recently Blow-Out?

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I watch a number of yields for signs of financial market stress.  Above are the charts for the 30-day commercial paper/bill spr...
Friday, December 15, 2017

Industrial production for November 2017: Dear Doomers, you can shut up about "soft" vs. "hard" data now

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 - by New Deal democrat For months and months this year, the mantra of the Doomers was that the "soft data" of the Fed reg...

Real retail sales for November 2017 portend positivity for 2018

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 - by New Deal democrat There have been any number of perfectly good and perfectly obvious write-ups of yesterday's retail sale...
Thursday, December 14, 2017

Real wages stagnate YoY, decline significantly since July

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 - by New Deal democrat So lackluster has wage growth been that even the modest uptick in consumer inflation to 2.2% YoY in November...

The Long-End of the Curve Isn't Predicting Booming Growth

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The chart above plots 10 years of the 10-year CMT (left scale) and the Y/Y percentage change in GPD (right scale).  Notice the follow...
Wednesday, December 13, 2017

US Bond Market Week in Review: The Fed Is Chasing an Inflation Ghost

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This is over at XE.com (Special thanks to NDD for getting me on the specter/ghost angle)

The Phantom Menace: Fed rate hikes and non-existent inflation

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 - by New Deal democrat This isn't the first time the Fed has engaged in a rate hiking campaign in the face of somnolent inflation.  ...

The Ugly Picture of US Wage Growth

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The chart above shows the Y/Y percentage change in the average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory employees.  We can break this data d...
Tuesday, December 12, 2017

October JOLTS report: a good post-hurricane rebound

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 -  by New Deal democrat The August and September hurricanes continue to make their impacts felt in the economic data.  Yesterday's...
Monday, December 11, 2017

The wage - debt deflation dynamic and the next recession

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 - by New Deal democrat One of the important dynamics why recessions end is that inflation decelerates more than wage growth. Thus, ...