I am the first to say that I do not understand the whims of the market, but today we saw a pretty schizophrenic display. Attention in the US focused on the Fed’s Open Market Committee statement. Earlier this week, not much was expected, since the Fed is somewhat constrained by fact that the Obama team […]
Read more...The forecast for a global international contraction by the Institute of International Finance is significant because it is the first to project negative growth for 2009. That may seem unexceptional to some readers. However, the IMF is forecasting growth of 1.5% for 2009, which it actually sees as a serious recessionary level. Why? Emerging economies […]
Read more...Wellie, lots of commentators (see here and here for a sampling) have taken note that Timothy Geithner contradicted himself royally today in his Congressional testimony. And mind you, this was WRITTEN testimony, so one cannot give him the benefit of the doubt (such as that he did a bad job of tap dancing when faced […]
Read more...If you believe the China fourth quarter GDP release, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Some analysts see power consumption as a more accurate proxy of economic activity than GDP releases. Consider then the following report from Bloomberg on January 12: Power consumption fell 4 percent in October from a year earlier, […]
Read more...I know I sometimes go for hyperbole in headlines, but the statement above is accurate. Your humble blogger had expected China (and presumably the rest of Asian) trade to fall in January and February from already depressed levels. While the drop in Chinese exports for December was less than experts expected (imports fell more sharply […]
Read more...Even though China’s trade surpluses continue at record and near record levels (imports are falling faster than exports), China’s foreign exchange reserves are not even close to keeping pace. Readers may recall that a massive amount of money flowed into China, a good bit of it disguised (FDI was one of the suspect categories) because […]
Read more...The oil-rich countries of the Middle East have some advantages in pursuing the “green” energy market. First, they have pools of investment capital they can turn to this purpose. Possibly more important than access to money is that the funding sources may be willing to take a longer term horizon and lower returns than US […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal issued a story that appeared to rely on a single source “a person familiar with the data said” and Bloomberg, apparently unable to corroborate the leak, repeated key bits of the Journal article, with attribution. The highlights: Chinese exports fell an additional 2.8% in December versus the prior December, while imports […]
Read more...While it would be easy to dismiss this move by the People’s Bank of China to inch away from dollar based invoicing, the fact is that the use of other currencies for denominating trade transactions has been on the rise. We cited this Globe and Mail story back in February: The chief executive of jewellery […]
Read more...We expected economic conditions in China to deteriorate faster (at least for the next few months) than most had forecast, and that seems to be coming to pass. From Reuters: Chinese factories slashed output and workers at a record pace in December and manufacturing activity overall fell for a fifth month as the global financial […]
Read more...We have worried out loud that the policy remedies being pursued by the US amount to trying to restore the status quo ante to as great a degree as possible, particularly in trying to resturn US overconsumption to something approaching its former levels. Although it may be difficult to work two agendas, crisis response and […]
Read more...Since I am endeavoring to spend some time with my family, forgive me for dispatching this New York Times story, “Dollar Shift: Chinese Pockets Filled as Americans’ Emptied.” The article buys, hook, line and sinker, then- Fed-governor Ben Bernanke’s depiction of so-called global imbalances (the US borrowing from abroad to fund overconsumption; Japan, China, Taiwan, […]
Read more...I am now wondering if Google censors posts (I use Blogger), I put this post up at 1:33 AM, and even had a reader e-mail me that the post had disappeared (with no listing in “Recent Posts” which happens if I put up a post and then remove it). I have a record that it […]
Read more...Liquefied natural gas doesn’t get much attention in the US because in aggregate, it is not a significant energy source here, and imports were at a five-year low in 2008. But supply/demand conditions has shifted dramatically overseas. The combination of depressed LNG prices and cheap shipping means that excess LNG may show up in the […]
Read more...One of the ugly features of the Great Depression that in many (but not all) cases worsened the severity of the contraction was that countries adopted “me first” policies with little regard to their broader ramifications. The poster child of this pattern is Smoot Hawley. Although there is some dispute among economists as to whether […]
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