Forecasts

Today’s ADP employment report came out with a figure of 139,000 jobs added to the US economy in February. This number is low and comes with downward revisions to past numbers. The ADP data are the last big numbers we will see except weekly…

By Michael Pettis I don’t often make reference to these kinds of things in my blog, but Saturday’s terrorist attack in the Kunming train station – in which 29 innocent people were hacked to death (the toll was especially high among the…

Yesterday, I began my Ten Surprises List. As a reminder, the surprise list is loosely based off Byron Wien’s list of ten surprises which he has conducting doing at Blackstone and Morgan Stanley for the last thirty years. Wien defines his…

Marshall Auerback was on CNBC yesterday afternoon talking to Kelly Evans and Steve Liesman on Closing Bell. And his read on the US economy is like mine, 1.5-2.0% underlying growth. He thinks the weak Q1 numbers are not just weather-related.…

Brazil goes into a recession. Spanish GDP growth rebounds and outstrips German GDP growth. Gold rebounds to beyond $1600 an ounce. US GDP growth in Q2 and Q3 is below 2%. 10-year US Treasury yields fall below 2.25%. Abenomics ‘fails’…

I have been sitting on my ten surprises for this year because not enough ideas had crystallized… until now. I think I will be ready to write the piece next week. Let me go through my thinking somewhat stream of consciously here. As a…

2014 is a transition year for the United States because 2013 was the breakout year for growth. In the third and fourth quarters of 2013, US real GDP statistics showed annualized growth of 4.1 and 3.2% respectively. Official statistics also…

This past holiday sales season was weak for a number of retailers in the US. But, discounting was the culprit rather than poor demand by consumers. I see retail sales holding up but a shake out in retail is sure to come as the deflationary…

Abenomics is one of the most aggressive economic experiments we have witnessed in the post-Marshall Plan developed world. The questions is whether the massive stimulus campaign can work when politically there will always be discomfort with…

When I last wrote you I was talking about 2013 as being akin to the mid-cycle tightening year of 1994. In this view, we are well into a business cycle but it is far from over because of cyclical agents could spur the cycle on. But what…