Today’s headlines may be celebrating the recovery in US jobs numbers in November (or at least the BIS’s ‘non-farm payroll’ guesstimate), but the reality may that we are just seeing the month-on-month distortions and knock-on effects of goosing the pre-election report for September which seem to have come out of the October figures. In that […]
Continue reading
Now that’s a surprise, an upbeat job growth (gu)estimate released by BIS, in its last update before the November elections. One might almost think they are trying to apply some lipstick to ‘Bidenomics’ to avoid the prospect of their own jobs being culled by that prospective DOGE grim reaper, Elon Musk. What may be less […]
Continue reading
Can the USD be saved? Given the trajectory in Federal debt and deficits and apparent reluctance of the Uniparty to extract their snouts from the public trough that seems unlikely. Indeed, the assumption that inflation and debt monetisation will continue to define US Treasury policy is the defacto consensus opinion within financial markets and as […]
Continue reading
After lies, damn lies and statistics, government ‘estimates’ such as the BIS’s monthly guesstimates for non-farm payrolls must rank as one of the more unreliable economic datasets, particularly in the run up to a quadrennial election year in the US. While also undermined by the debt fueled life support currently being administered by the incumbent […]
Continue reading
If ‘everyone’ believes interest rates are going back down, then why was US corporate bond issuance up +54% YoY in Q2 and with the high yield/junk end the most active? Seems like corporate treasurers were happy to unload some extra debt to “willing buyers at a fair market price” as Jeremy Irons character ‘John Tuld’ […]
Continue reading
Markets are down as a sense of fear grips investors. That however, has less to do with a sudden re-evaluation of the economic outlook following the release of the US employment survey data for July and much more to do with a growing panic that the US Fed is resisting the pressure to be bounced […]
Continue reading
US residential construction can slightly lag private housing starts, but never to this extent. Either the US residential construction industry has become a lot less efficient (as in the ratio of employees needed to build the average house), or there’s something increasingly fishy with the official BIS employment data.
Continue reading
Has the US BIS not got the memo to support the easing narrative with softening economic data, or is the ECB and Euro being hung out to dry? For those hoodwinked by the manipulated GDP deflator assumptions (see below) between Q4 2023 and Q1 this year, into over-estimating the slowdown in economic activity must have […]
Continue reading