Economy

If you look at the rate of growth in credit, it tells you something. When it hits an inflection point i.e. when credit growth peaks and begins to decelerate, investors should take it as a harbinger of declining GDP and a signal to shift…

Spain has become the new Greece. Actually, in many respects Spain is now worse than Greece. The Spanish unemployment rate is already so high and unlike Athens, Madrid has made no headway in reducing its public debt levels (whereas the…

The US manufacturing ISM surprised the market in a favorable direction. Rather than soften like the consensus expected, the diffusion index rose to 54.8 from 53.4. This represents the strongest showing in eleven months.

Note the peak in manufacturing jobs in June 1977, which represented 22 percent of all nonfarm payrolls, then, to fall to less than 9 percent of total employment today. It’s too earlier to claim victory with the current recovery in the…

Last week I said I would do a better job of tracking the Australian housing market as my prediction for 2012 is that it is a bubble which will pop.

The mood has turned against austerity in the euro zone because it is now rightly seen as anti-growth. The question is what next. Here I will hazard a few predictions of where euro zone policy is headed including a EuroTARP.

The Eurozone is experiencing a sharp contraction in the retail sector.

Ever since Willem Buiter mentioned the probability of a Spanish bailout some time in 2012, speculation has been rife about a Spanish bailout. In this column I argue that Spain is still too big to bail and that any bailout for Spain must…

"Real final sales" and factory production continued to be supported by inventory building . Governments continued to shrink their spending, and they sucked -0.60% from the headline number. This report shows per capita disposable income is…

The details are a bit better as household consumption was stronger at 2.9% after a 2.1% pace in Q4 11. This accounted for about 2 percentage points of the 2.2% growth. How is the consumption being financed? Real disposable income rose 0.4%…