- by New Deal democrat
My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha.
Both the long leading and short leading indicators have weakened in the past two weeks. The former is due to the short end of the Treasury yield curve re-inverteg. The latter is due in part to continued weakness in new jobless claims, but mainly to commodities weakening, and the flip side of that coin, a major strengthening of the US$. Here’s a graph of the US$:
As you can see, it made new all-time highs this week against other currencies (blue, right scale), and has surged YoY by well over 5% (red, left scale), one of the strongest moves in the past 20 years.
When the US$ increases sharply like that, imports get cheaper and exports suffer. This negatively affects GDP. Starting new trade wars obviously won’t exactly help that situation.
As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the economy, and reward me with some lunch money.
