Japan

Soft data in the US and Japan was not enough to spur central banks in either country into action over the last two days. For me, it highlights first how vulnerable the global economy is. But, more than that, it points to the ineffectiveness…

By Frances Coppola originally posted at Coppola Comment Japan has just introduced negative rates on reserves, following the example of the Riksbank, the Danish National Bank, the ECB and the Swiss National Bank. The Bank of Japan has…

The US economy is not in a recession right now and the latest numbers on US GDP confirm this view. And while the headline growth number was weak, the consumer spending and personal income numbers are supportive of 2%ish growth into 2016.…

Over the past couple of years, there has been a decent amount of chatter about the Fed’s not being able to ‘reload’ in order to have enough tools to deal effectively with the next cyclical trough. And while the fear of running out of runway…

The title of this post is what the Fed wants us to believe. It wants us to believe that it is prepared to raise interest rates this year but that it will increase them slowly by assessing the data, hiking once and re-assessing, and then…

Tiger 5 - Grexit is inevitable

Deflationary pressures in China indicates that we probably need monetary tightening, not loosening. I know this sounds extremely counterintuitive, and so violates what we have learned about the world by assuming that the world looks a lot…

Today, I want to highlight some of the best stories in the news today. US economy Let’s start off with the US, where the hiring of holiday workers is said to track very well with retail sales. In the lead up to the holidays, the…

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…

Japan seems to be heading deeper and deeper into a very risky experiment based on a misunderstanding about what the problem facing the country actually is.