consumers

Underconsumption is the term we’re now using to describe the thesis that we are living in a world of excess supply. The novelty here - as I pointed out yesterday - is not that the world is oversupplied - and therefore lacking in developed…

The GDP report today showed middling growth of an annualized 1.9% in the US in the last quarter of 2016. That’s not gangbusters, but it’s not bad either. The thing to look at is consumption, because that shows the consumer chugging along.…

US GDP numbers released today show the economy grew at a 1.9% annualized pace in the last quarter. That follows a 3.5% pace in the quarter before. Not bad. But the question now is how long this will keep up. Declining auto sales might offer…

Yesterday, China announced one of the most important tax reforms of the past twenty years. It is replacing a business tax on gross revenue for non-manufacturing companies with a VAT. Manufacturing companies have been subject to a VAT…

Ever since Willem Buiter’s call for a global recession within the next two years, people have been parsing the data for some indication that the US has been fatally compromised by contagion from emerging markets. Nothing in Buiter’s piece…

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 have a lot of threads to cover today. So let’s get right into it. New home sales. I want to start in the US first because the macro data backdrop is good. The first piece of data here is actually a bit soft and says that residential…

Back in 2012, three economists published a paper via the San Francisco Fed that looked at nearly every advanced economy business cycle from 1870 forward with the object of understanding the role of credit in the business cycle. Matthew…

This post is on the same topic of the US economy that I addressed yesterday. But I want to go a bit deeper and add more colour to my comments. Signs that the US economy’s cyclical outlook are improving are getting ever more numerous,…

By Andrea Terzi originally published at Social Europe and republished with consent of Author The anti-austerity vote in the European elections reflected two different kinds of discontent. One is a feeling of frustration, which is…