Economy

By Marc Chandler There have been three flash PMI reports today, and each was surprising. China and Germany surprised on the downside while the French surprise was on the upside. HSBC's flash read on China's manufacturing sector weakened…

Marc Faber appeared on Bloomberg Television yesterday to discuss the Chinese economy. While Faber generally seems to be a long-term bull on China, he had some disquieting things to say about the extent of malinvestment in China due to the…

Credit growth in the US seems to have stabilized and may be on the rise. It's worth mentioning that the bottom in loan growth just happened to correspond to the start of Fed's taper. Coincidence? Maybe. But why is corporate America…

As a confirmation of a significant downward adjustment to China's growth, a battery of economic reports yesterday morning all came in materially below expectations.

By Marc Chandler US retail sales rose 0.3% in February, a little more than expected. The news was blunted by sharp downward revisions to the January series, leaving the level of retail sales lower and pointing to somewhat less personal…

I had four big topics in today’s links: Japan, China, Ukraine and Spain. I want to concentrate here on the two Asian countries over the European ones. The wage issue in Japan is an important one because it informs the policy choices in the…

While the credit expansion/savings reduction needs to continue to grow to support GDP growth, the credit expansion/savings reduction doesn’t need to ‘spike up’ proactively as it does when the fiscal tightening is proactive.

Here is a chart showing the number of transactions that involve acquisitions of an asset management business by year. It tells us about a couple of trends developing in recent years.

In trying to assess the trajectory of the US economy, one is struck by the recent divergence between the manufacturing and the services sectors. Most analysts blame the weakness in the service sector and the resulting softness in the labor…

By WIn Thin Parallels have already been drawn between current events in Ukraine and the Russian-Georgian conflict of 2008. These parallels are unmistakable, yet the one big difference so far is that Ukraine has taken care not to give…