manufacturing

In February, the rate of growth of Italy’s manufacturing sector showed the fastest increase in output and new orders since December 2015. Employment growth was the highest since late 2000.

While the US economy has decelerated enough since mid-2015 to put me on recession watch, it has not reached the point of recession. Moreover, the data do not indicate a recession is in the offing in the near-term. Rather, a combination of…

The recent data coming out of the US has been almost unrelentingly negative outside of the recent jobs reports. The Atlanta Fed GDP now report was already down to 0.7% for Q4 when poor output and retail sales data came out. I expect the…

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…

The meltdown in Brazil is not exactly unexpected since one of my ten surprises for 2014 was that Brazil goes into recession. But I find the pace of the currency reaction alarming and we should be prepared for a crisis as a result. In the…

Continuing where I left off last week, I am going to emphasize here that the Federal Reserve is likely to raise US interest rates unless the US economy slows materially. Meanwhile, the economic and market fundamentals are moving in the…

Despite the title, this is not a mono-themed post but more of a highlight of recent news and data and their importance in interpreting the direction of the economy and potential effect on markets. I do want to concentrate on European and US…

This week’s economic and market themes piece is going to be a little shorter than usual because I have covered a lot of the major topics earlier in the week. United States. Let’s start with the US. The jobs data today showed 208,000 jobs…

This is a long-form post on Ukraine. The big news, however, is from the European Union where the PMIs and a slew of other economic data came out today. The data showed the European economy improving broadly from its weakened recovery…

The economic data out of the US and Spain yesterday were very good and support the idea that both of these economies are seeing recoveries that are accelerating. Some thoughts on the data below