Political Economy

When I last wrote about the US economy on Friday, I wrote that the jobs numbers "support my baseline view that the rollover in US GDP growth has been mild so far. The threat to that outlook comes in the form of policy and the anticipated…

The jobs report that came out today and the jobless claims report that came out yesterday both support my baseline view that the rollover in US GDP growth has been mild so far. The threat to that outlook comes in the form of policy and the…

Real quick here The latest week's initial unemployment claims figures came out today. And they show claims have plummeted from their highest levels three weeks ago. I take this as a signal that the second wave of viral infections is not…

The new normal We are in the middle of a grand social experiment. That's the overriding thought I had this morning as I looked out my bathroom window on the empty streets below. Some of the longer-term impacts of this experiment are clear -…

I think the title of this post lays out exactly what I intend to cover. It's all about the US economy and its vulnerability to a double dip recession due to the fiscal cliff and rising jobless claims. To cut to the chase, I haven't been…

The news flow is eliciting five themes for me right now. And I will dive into them briefly below. They are gold, the US dollar and rates, Europe, Covid-19 in the US and US fiscal stimulus. I am not going to take a hard view here. I simply…

I did a quick experiment with US initial jobless claims for my colleagues at Real Vision for today's Daily Briefing. And because the results were so interesting, I thought I'd post them here despite having just posted earlier this morning.…

Framing the economic path This is just a quick update on how I am thinking about the US economy. I am going to put this outside the paywall for once in order to update everyone. I'll put the run-up to today in a bullet point framework up…

This is my first time posting in a week. There was a combination of factors that kept me away from the newsletter like pressing work at Real Vision and a lack of revealing economic data flow. But, the biggest factor was the coronavirus news…

As I write this, I am waiting for the latest jobless claims data out of the US to be released. But, irrespective of what the data show, unfortunately we are seeing a W-shaped pattern to economic data. And that looks set to continue. Some…