Economic Data

The Kocherlakota speech is important because he was a hawk earlier in the third easing campaign. See last August's post "Kocherlakota: Statement on Dissenting Permanent Zero Policy." Greg Ip writes in two insightful tweets, "Kocherlakota's…

By Sober Look Anecdotal evidence suggests that increasing numbers of western expats are beginning to leave China. A recent article that has gone viral in the expat community in China called "Why I’m leaving the country I loved" describes…

By Sober Look The Citi Economic Surprise index was fairly accurate in pointing to a US slowdown in the first half of 2012. One therefore should not dismiss the recent reversal in the indicator's trend. The index just went into the positive…

By Marc Chandler The US employment data is an important disappointment, especially coming on the heels of yesterday's ADP and service ISM reports that had lifted expectations. The private sector created a net 103k jobs, well below the 143k…

By Sober Look As yesterday's flash PMI numbers show, the declines in iron ore prices (discussed here) were indeed signaling an ongoing broad based slowdown in China's economy. Bloomberg: - China’s manufacturing may be contracting at a…

By Marc Chandler In recent weeks, the market had appeared to be scaling back expectations of another round of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve.   US 10-year Treasury yields rose nearly 40 bp since the August 1.  The reconsideration…

By Sober Look Back in May we discussed the impact of several possible "fiscal cliff" scenarios on the US GDP growth (the GDP drag). Those projections were developed by Goldman. We now have a similar analysis performed by Credit Suisse. CS…

By Sober Look With all the conflicting economic indicators coming out of China, it is difficult to gauge whether economic growth has stabilized after recent declines. One indicator that clearly points to potential ongoing slowdown in…

In the short term rebalancing may increase the amount of global demand absorbed by China, but over the longer term it should reduce it. Rebalancing will inevitably result in falling prices for hard commodities, and so will hurt countries…

I don't think China or Australia is falling out of bed yet but the situation is clearly deteriorating in both countries. A lot of pundits have begun to question the official statistics out of China, especially given the weak electricity…