January 2019

By Marc Chandler This first appeared on Marc's site, Marc to Market In the iconography of Mao, some see pictures of the Chairman showing both ears as signaling that he was listening to all the people.  In this sense, Powell had his Mao…

I was reading about the potential candidacy of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz for US President in the 2020 election just now. He plans to run as an independent, potentially dividing the anti-Trump vote, should Trump survive until then.…

My last daily post was about the emerging consensus view that a global recession is just around the corner. And the sense I get is that people believe this recession - unlike the one during the Great Financial Crisis - is being stoked by a…

Quick note: With the ECB's policy statement today, it's clear that a lot of major central banks are still running policy that is too tight given the emerging global growth slowdown. I mentioned the Bank of Canada yesterday. But I also…

What are markets saying? The good times are over! The days of extremely low volatility, with the VIX trading at 12 or 13 are now over. We may see an up day or a down day, but the volatility is now higher than it was before - perhaps…

By Will Abel, Silvana Tenreyro, and Gregory Thwaites This post first appeared on Vox. The growing prominence of giant companies in advanced economies has raised concerns about the increase in monopoly power (e.g. Eeckhout and de Loecker…

China's slowdown Let's start with China today because yesterday the Chinese released their worst growth figures in 28 years. The 6.4% growth number was expected. Even so, the problems are large. Here's how Reuters described it yesterday:…

The euro is “celebrating” its 20th anniversary this month, but they aren’t popping corks across the continent. The underlying assumption of a common currency—namely, that it would lead to a convergence of the member countries’ production,…

Analysts are increasingly skeptical that China’s very high reported GDP growth rate provides a meaningful picture of the economy’s health. There are, however, at least three very different ways that reported GDP can fail to reflect the…

A couple of things today. The default is no-deal, the base case is extension of article 50 I waited until the bust settled on the no-confidence vote before I decided to write again about Brexit. It was clear that the fear of Corbyn as PM…