- Home /
- Politics
“Carney warns fall in migrant workers could push up wages and inflation” – Doh!
“There’s an old saying. Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining” (The Outlaw Josey Wales – 1976) The headlines, such as the one above from the Guardian may have juiced up the point a little, but underlying the attempted prevarication in his recent speech on Globalisation and inflation, this is pretty […]
Continue readingUS adds +205k jobs in July – normally a positive for the US dollar, but now?
The problem of communicating a softening macro outlook is that it lowers interest rate expectations which in turn is a buy signal for not just investors, but also recruiters. So while the IMF cut its US GDP expectations for 2017 and 2018 by -20bps and -30bps respectively (both now to +2.1%) and currency markets have ‘drumfped’ […]
Continue readingYellen does virtuous – 5 years too late!
Confused? Well you should be be if you’ve been believing the usual output from the Federal Reserve. Contrary to the narrative of robust US economic growth and tightening labour markets requiring a normalisation of interest rates, things aren’t quite as rosy as Ms Yellen had been suggesting. Behind the increasingly absurd non-farm payroll data with […]
Continue readingUK consumers running on empty
If the UK consumer expenditure numbers reported by VISA in mid June suggest a stalling domestic economy, last week’s ONS release of the UK household savings ratio for Q1 suggests piggy banks are having to be raided to fund what little growth in expenditures we are seeing. This all seems a World away from the […]
Continue readingUK election result – ‘hard brexit’ no less likely
So what now? The nightmare scenario, whereby Labour could form a Government looks unlikely. With 317 out of the 648 seats (of the 650 seats total) now counted, the Tories are clearly short of an overall majority, but with their historic allies, the DUP with 10 seats they can just scrape through, particularly should Sinn […]
Continue readingUK election special – Theresa May, or perhaps not!
Oh Theresa, why oh why? Was it personal ambition and vanity that led you to risk an overall party majority for what YouGov is now projecting will be another hung Parliament, including the possibility of a Labour led administration? And this would not be the Labour of Blair or Brown, but a return to the […]
Continue readingDonny two scoops
Forget Trump sacking FBI chief Comey or the occasional missile strike on another’s sovereign territory, the mainstream media has now got their teeth into something really big. Don’t tell the kids, but he gets two scoops of ice cream, while the journalists only got one! The Don seems to have attracted a new and more […]
Continue readingApril Non-farm payrolls: how to turn +76k jobs into +194k
This is feeling like Groundhog day. Another monthly jobs report by the Dept of Labor showing strong employment growth and triggering a wall of narrative from the markets proclaiming the next rate rise like the second coming, but another conclusion based on what Trump might describe as ‘fake news’. Were those who predicted April MoM […]
Continue reading