Economic Data

Forget about the executive orders and Trump press conferences. This is all for show - reality TV, if you will. Concentrate instead on what actually happens, what policies are actually implemented and what impact this is going to have on the…

This is going to be a quick hit post to get some thoughts down on paper because a few threads are coalescing for me that I want to give some coherence to. The essence of the threads revolves around the tension at the Fed between normalizing…

Early on in President Trump’s new administration, too much of his energy is being placed on divisive ‘cultural’ issues and not enough attention is being paid to economic policies. To the degree Trump has turned to the economy, much of his…

A lot of people are saying the rally in shares since early November that took the Dow over 20,000 is exhausted. That may be the case. However, short of a 1987-style crash, we’re going to have see a recession before shares retreat…

Donald Trump’s vision of economics is becoming clear as he makes his cabinet picks. In particular, his picks of Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary and Larry Kudlow as probable Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors point to a more…

This is a quick post about the US economy. To put it simply, I am upbeat about what the near-term holds for the US economy. I have lots of doubts about the longer term. But whereas I might have led with the doubts earlier in the year, as…

This summer – when stock markets across the globe began to rally after their post-Brexit collapse, bond markets put in a top. US 10-year yields bottomed at 1.35% on July 8th. And in the time since, they have zoomed to over 2.5%. In short,…

China’s success will depend on the extent to which Beijing in 2016 is able to centralize power, to begin to sell off government assets (probably local and provincial, and not central, government assets), to rein in credit growth, and to…

I haven’t posted much recently - mostly because there haven’t been many developments economically that change my macro view. We still live in a slow growth world, where recession is not the base case n the US, the UK, or the eurozone. And…

As I start this post, I am naming it "Why I'm on US recession watch despite 2% growth". I don't know if that name will stick when I publish this piece; nonetheless, that is the theme I am trying to get across. When I look at the economic…