Analysis Topic: Economic Trends Analysis
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Monday, March 03, 2014
Is Bad Weather Behind Weak US Economic Trends? / Economics / US Economy
By: Frank_Shostak
Some key US economic data shows visible weakening. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo sentiment index slumped to 46 in February from 56 in January.
The New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Empire State general business conditions index fell to 4.48 in February from 12.51 the month before.
Saturday, March 01, 2014
What Can Nations Learn from Norway and Kuwait in Managing Sovereign Wealth Funds? / Economics / Sovereign Wealth Funds
By: Sam_Chee_Kong
To begin with what are Sovereign Wealth Funds? According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, a SWF can be defined as follows.
“A Sovereign Wealth Fund entity is a state-owned investment fund established from balance of payment surpluses, official foreign exchange operations, the proceeds from privatizations, governmental transfer payments, fiscal surpluses and/or receipts resulting from resource exports”
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Saturday, March 01, 2014
Do U.S. Economic Reports Mean Anything This Time? / Economics / US Economy
By: Sy_Harding
Some of the Federal Reserve’s districts compile and release monthly economic reports for their regions.
In the last week or two, those reports were that the Fed’s Empire State (NY) Mfg Index plunged from 12.5 in January to 4.5 in February. The Fed’s Philadelphia Region Index plunged from a positive reading of + 9.4 in January to - 6.3 in February. The Dallas Fed’s Mfg Index dropped from 3.8 in January to 0.3 in February. The Richmond Fed’s Index plummeted from +12 in January to -6 in February.
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Wednesday, February 26, 2014
The High Price of Delaying the Debt Default / Economics / Global Debt Crisis 2014
By: Thorsten_Polleit
Credit is a wonderful tool that can help advance the division of labor, thereby increasing productivity and prosperity. The granting of credit enables savers to spread their income over time, as they prefer. By taking out loans, investors can implement productive spending plans that they would be unable to afford using their own resources.
The economically beneficial effects of credit can only come about, however, if the underlying credit and monetary system is solidly based on free-market principles. And here is a major problem for today’s economies: the prevailing credit and monetary regime is irreconcilable with the free market system.
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Reviving the ‘Real World’ Scenario That’s Disappeared from Government Reports / Economics / Economic Statistics
By: Submissions
F. Wiley writes: For 50 years or so the federal government has deliberately and to an increasing extent misstated probable future budget deficits. Democrats and Republicans are guilty. The White House is guilty. And so is Congress. Private firms that deliberately misrepresent their financial statements in this fashion would be guilty of a crime… The magnitude of the misrepresentation is breathtaking. - Former St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President William Poole, writing in the Wall Street Journal last April
Monday, February 24, 2014
Disappointing U.S. Economic Data - Whether or Not it's the Weather / Economics / US Economy
By: Michael_Pento
Wall Street and Washington have summarily dismissed the recent spate of disappointing economic data by claiming it is solely based upon the weather. The equity market is 100% convinced that winter is to blame for the faltering economy; and that even if stocks have it all wrong, Ms. Yellen and co. will immediately print enough money to make everything ok.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
The US Great Depression 1920/21 / Economics / Economic Depression
By: Jonathan_Davis
Never heard of it?
Come on sure you have. You know of the Great Depression of the 1930s. So you must know of the Great Depression of 1920/21.
No?
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Friday, February 21, 2014
U.S. Economy Weather Impact Narrative Getting Confusing / Economics / US Economy
By: Ronan_Keenan
The “weather impact” debate has been ongoing for much of this year and looks set to continue for a while longer. Initially there seemed to be a clear narrative that colder-than-normal temperatures were slowing economic activity and markets seemed to gladly discount weak figures. But several data releases this week have brought confusion to the tidy story.
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Thursday, February 20, 2014
Deadly Deflation Myths / Economics / Deflation
By: Dan_Amerman
As will be demonstrated herein, using both historical and present-day events, key aspects of current deflationary theory can be characterized as the combination of 1) an absurdity; 2) a misunderstanding; and 3) an oversimplification; all working together to create 4) a serious danger for investors.
Few questions are of greater concern for investors than: "will it be inflation or deflation that will dominate the coming years?"
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Venezuela Exchange Controls and Plunging Petroleum Production / Economics / Venezuela
By: Steve_H_Hanke
Foreign airlines have begun to restrict ticket sales in Venezuela. As the bolivars’ value evaporates, and with exchange controls in force, the airlines fear that the funds they have in Caracas will evaporate, too. By restricting ticket sales, the airlines will limit the amount of new money that is trapped behind the government’s wall of exchange controls.
Of course, President Nicolas Maduro isn’t the first autocrat to impose exchange controls, and he won’t be the last to impose these confiscatory policies. Indeed, the pedigree of exchange controls can be traced back to Plato, the father of statism. Inspired by Lycurgus of Sparta, Plato embraced the idea of an inconvertible currency as a means to preserve the autonomy of the state from outside interference.
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Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Manufacturing Numbers Show Cause for Concern in China / Economics / China Economy
By: Submissions
Richard Cox writes: As the global recovery continues to progress, investors as keenly focused on developments in early Asia as a means for gauging whether or not the progress in economic growth is being seen in all areas. Without clear evidence that emerging markets in Asia have participated in the improvements, there is less reason to believe that the global recovery is moving forward as strongly as had been thought previously.
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Tuesday, February 18, 2014
China Fooled the World (But It Cannot Last) / Economics / China Economy
By: Mike_Shedlock
Steen Jakobsen, chief economist at Saxo Bank emailed a pair of interesting links on the explosion of investment and debt in China.
First consider the BBC report How China Fooled the World by Robert Peston.
Read full article... Read full article...Robert Peston travels to China to investigate how this mighty economic giant could actually be in serious trouble. China is now the second largest economy in the world and for the last 30 years China's economy has been growing at an astonishing rate. While Britain has been in the grip of the worst recession in a generation, China's economic miracle has wowed the world.
Monday, February 17, 2014
Europe in the Calm Before the Next Financial Storm / Economics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: MISES
Andrew Cullen writes: Austrian business cycle theory explains that the “bust” phase of that cycle is created by extension of the cheap and plentiful credit by a fractional reserve banking (FRB) system. A FRB system is inherently fragile during the bust phase as its leverage (lending as a percentage of its own capital) exposes the banks to the emerging tsunami of non-performing loans and impaired collateral that are the manifestations of malinvestment.
Monday, February 17, 2014
The Economic Singularity - Stuck in a Liquidity Trap / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
I fully intended to write today about a recently released academic paper that illustrates nearly every bad idea currently being bandied about in the field of economics. The insidious part is that the paper is considered mainstream and noncontroversial. Simply reading it required me to up my blood pressure medicine dosage. It is going to take me a little longer to finish that letter, and I realized that it needs a certain setup – one that coauthor Jonathan Tepper and I conveniently wrote a few months ago and included in the book Code Red.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Global Economy Economic Stink-Tanks / Economics / Global Economy
By: Andy_Sutton
There’s an old quote along the lines of if you’re going to lie, make it a big one, repeat it like crazy, and eventually, people will regard it as truth. Truth is awfully cheap these days. For as buffaloed as most people are with the state of economic affairs not only in the United States, but also in the rest of the world, you’d think they still believed the Earth was flat.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
How Special-Interest Groups Benefit from Minimum Wage Laws / Economics / Wages
By: MISES
Gary M. Galles writes: Those campaigning for a substantial jump in the minimum wage all assert that the purpose is to help working families. Unfortunately, careful students of the evidence come to a different conclusion. As Mark Wilson summarized it, “evidence from a large number of academic studies suggests that minimum wage increases don’t reduce poverty levels.”
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
The Broken Limb and Burst Pipe Economic Fallacies / Economics / Economic Theory
By: James_Quinn
Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.
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Monday, February 10, 2014
The Circular Economy – Roundabouts And Toboggans For Growth / Economics / Energy Resources
By: Andrew_McKillop
Waste Dumps to Resource Mountains
The Sochi Winter Games waste dump could interest future corporate geologists a lot more than the Chernobyl sarcophage. Leaked reports and furtive newsreel footage shows a pyramid 35-stories high, thinly and partly covered in soil, more than 150 metres wide at its base. And growing. Leakage from the Sochi pyramid of waste is, of course, toxic but also contains a hard-to-believe mix and mingle of metals, minerals and organic compounds including gold and with in fact little surprise, uranium and also of course pesticides, chrome hexafluoride, dioxin and similar deadly poisons with a high dollar value per unit weight – either as a resource or as a threat to society needing expensive disposal.
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Sunday, February 09, 2014
Most Dangerous Economic Era, The Great Divergence: Productivity and Wages / Economics / Earnings
By: John_Mauldin
"In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.
"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
"Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil."
– From an essay by Frédéric Bastiat in 1850, "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen"
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Saturday, February 08, 2014
U.S. Economic Outlook Is About More Than Just Jobs / Economics / US Economy
By: Sy_Harding
The Labor Department’s employment report for January was the second straight monthly negative surprise in that area of the economy. It showed only 113,000 new jobs were created in January, well short of the consensus forecast for 190,000.
As they did in reaction to December’s dismal jobs report, Wall Street analysts are blaming it on the weather.
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