monetary policy

As Q2 continued along, it became ever more evident that private forecasts above 3% annualized were overly optimistic and that the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast below 1% would get revised up. We met in the middle at 2.3%. What’s more is Q1…

Last week the Fed admitted to having mistakenly made public forecasts by staff economists which suggested that the Fed is indeed on a 2015 rate hike path. As a result, policy divergence is now set to widen, with the result being a bid for…

There are a lot of competing narratives going around as to why Greece is in such trouble relative to the rest of the eurozone. A lot of this centers on whether Greek fiscal profligacy or poor credit controls by foreign banks was the main…

Now that the Greek crisis has died down, we can return to surveying the global economy for clues as to whether global growth will continue unabated. My sense right now is that the major theme to watch remains policy divergence, with the US…

This weekend’s dramatic events saw the ECB capping emergency assistance to Greece. This column argues that the ECB’s decision is the last of a long string of ECB mistakes in this crisis. Beyond triggering Greece’s Eurozone exit – thus…

The most recent retail sales numbers confirm the first quarter dip in GDP as an aberration. The US economy’s growth path, while subpar and uneven, remains on track. Some thoughts below

The abrupt spike in interest rates from mid-April to mid-May is very unlikely to be the beginning of something much bigger and much more likely to be the sort of occasional panic attack that Japan has seen so many of in recent years.

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…

Growth estimates for the full year are now diving to under 3% due to weakness in early Q2 data. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve is having difficulty deciphering what this means for interest rate policy. For now, however, policy divergence,…

Yesterday, the big news for US data was poor post-winter retail sales. I believe US consumption growth still supports a 2 or even 3%ish level of GDP growth. It is actually elsewhere where the US economy has shifted down: inventories,…