Economy

This morning, the US Labor Department reported a very bullish 321,000 increase in non-farm payrolls in November, well above expectations. Importantly, average hourly earnings showed the biggest gain since June 2013. And hours worked…

By Michael Pettis Two years ago it was hard to find analysts who expected average GDP growth over the rest of this decade to be less than 8%. The current consensus seems to have dropped to between 6% and 7% on average. I don’t think…

Tim Duy wrote a post on his blog on Sunday about his optimism about the US economy that got me thinking and I want to use it as a launching pad for a discussion about baseline economic scenarios. My baseline is positive, optimistic if you…

The latest batch of data points coming out of the global economy are a mixed bag. Some point to continued robust retail sales in the U.S. but other points show weakness in expected capital expenditure and hiring globally, while others show…

Right now, the global economy is slowing, with problems in Japan, China, Europe and the Emerging Markets. Only North American growth has remained strong as 2015 approaches. The dip in oil prices changes all of that. While a further fall…

Today, I want to highlight some of the best stories in the news today. US economy Let’s start off with the US, where the hiring of holiday workers is said to track very well with retail sales. In the lead up to the holidays, the…

Despite my upbeat view on the U.S., there are considerable headwinds to the global economy. We see this in the nexus of slowdowns in China and Europe and the decline in commodities, gold and oil which intersect with energy high yield bonds…

Last night, Japan’s GDP figures for Q3 came in much lower than expected. GDP fell an annualized 1.6% versus expectations for an annualized increase of 2.2%. This is as large a miss as you will see, and it calls into question the economic…

I stole this title from the Wall Street Journal because that was takeaway #1 in their post on the 5 takeaways on eurozone GDP. It seems apt but what does it mean? For me it means that the eurozone is at stall speed, vulnerable to crashing…

Gavyn Davies has a column up over at the Financial Times, which I think is a masterpiece at integrating a number of threads from different economic schools of thought into a composite picture of the global economy that makes sense. His view…