Analysis Topic: Economic Trends Analysis
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Inflation Watch: $245,000 to Raise a Child in United States / Economics / Inflation
By: EconMatters
Welcome to Middle-Income Family American Style
Yesterday the USDA`s annual report laid out another 2% increase in the cost to raise a child in the United States, and this only includes the costs associated with the age of 18, which any modern family realizes doesn`t include college, and the fact that many kids either live at home, or require financial help long after the age of 18.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Europe's Economic Malaise: The New Normal? / Economics / Euro-Zone
By: STRATFOR
George Friedman writes: Russia and Ukraine continue to confront each other along their border. Iraq has splintered, leading to unabated internal warfare. And the situation in Gaza remains dire. These events should be enough to constitute the sum total of our global crises, but they're not. On top of everything, the German economy contracted by 0.2 percent last quarter. Though many will dismiss this contraction outright, the fact that the world's fourth-largest economy (and Europe's largest) has shrunk, even by this small amount, is a matter of global significance.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
The Coming U.S. Economic Collapse Will Trigger a Revolution / Economics / US Economy
By: Harry_Dent
When the next economic collapse comes, and it’s inevitable, the revolution against the upper class will kick into higher gear!
Let me explain using my long-term economic cycle — the new 80-year, four season, Generation Wave — and an important 250-year cycle…
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Tuesday, August 19, 2014
This is Your Economic Recovery With and Without Drugs / Economics / Economic Recovery
By: James_Quinn
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Thomas Jefferson
Monday, August 18, 2014
The Keynesian Counterfactual is Japan / Economics / Japan Economy
By: Michael_Pento
We heard the "surprising" news last week that the Japanese economy shrank at an alarming 6.8 percent annualized rate in the three months through June, its biggest quarterly contraction since the 2011 earth quake and tsunami. Proving Japan's greatest national disaster, Abenomics, has failed and the Japanese economy has fallen victim to the scam called Keynesian economics. Defined as the belief that a country can tax, spend, devalue and inflate its way to prosperity.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Time Decay And No Escape For Abenomics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
Abenomics Does Not Work
So-called Abenomics is also (so) called Pure Keynesian. Two physics-related analogies help explain why neither Abenomics nor Keynesian economics will work. There is the concept of escape velocity – that is escape from recession - and the time rate of decay of plenty of things, for example of prices if deflation sets in. As we know, economists like to dress up their works on what is a subject that can never be scientific – economics – using mathematical formulae purporting to show neat functional relationships between “key aggregates”, but in several science domains, from astrophysics to subatomic physics firstly these terms have a real meaning. Secondly, ambiguity has to be allowed into the party. Multiple outcomes are perfectly possible.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Africa: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Economics / Africa
By: Steve_H_Hanke
Last week, President Obama hosted the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. He welcomed over 40 African heads of state and their outsized entourages to what was a festive affair. Indeed, even the Ebola virus in West Africa failed to dampen spirits in the Nation's capital. Perhaps it was the billions of dollars in African investment, announced by America's great private companies, that was so uplifting.
Friday, August 15, 2014
Don’t Assume What Is “Unseen” Doesn’t Exist / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Gary M. Galles writes: The use of the ceteris paribus, or “other things equal” assumption is an essential aspect of economic education. It is an important caveat that helps make sense of a complicated world by clarifying the incentive stories that comprise the core of economics.
Unfortunately, the often unthinking acceptance of that phrase has also provided an opening for misrepresenting economic reality in analyzing government interventions. That is because governments cannot change just one incentive. As a result, assuming certain “other things equal,” when those other things inherently cannot remain equal, provides cover for omitting adverse effects.
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Thursday, August 14, 2014
China's Credit Slowdown Raises Concerns About Overall Economic Health / Economics / China Economy
By: STRATFOR
New economic data released by China's National Bureau of Statistics on Aug. 13 shows the supply of credit to the Chinese economy expanded by only $44.3 billion in July, the slowest pace in almost six years. To be precise, credit expanded at the slowest pace since October 2008, the month after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the month before the Chinese government launched an economic stimulus program that sheltered China's economy from the worst effects of the global financial crisis. That program also locked China into a growth model grounded in the intimate bond between government-led credit expansion and housing and infrastructure construction -- one that the Chinese government is now struggling, against time and at the risk of crisis, to escape.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
High Frequency Failure Economics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
High Frequency Failure
Japan's most recent GDP data showing a 6.8% annual rate of contraction was quickly shrugged off by the markets as only a signal for more handouts from the Japanese government and the BOJ. But Shinzo Abe's government has to admit the failures are coming faster all the time. In the global finance industry we can move on from the easy explanation why we have HFT, Dark Pools, Libor rigging, FX rigging, oil and gold market rigging and the rest – that they deliver large easy profits to insiders, fixers and riggers. These fail-sure (rather than fail-safe) processes are also essential to maintaining an appearance of real economies with real markets. They serve this additional basic function.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
China Economy Transformation or Bust, Part 2 / Economics / China Economy
By: John_Mauldin
In last week’s Thoughts from the Frontline (“Transformation or Bust”), my young colleague Worth Wray and I continued our groundbreaking series exploring the risks posed by China’s rapid private sector debt growth and its consumption-repressing, investment-heavy growth model that is quickly running out of steam. China is the true conundrum in the global economy. It is an outlier in the history of development, with no true analogues. And while there is much to be appreciative of and admired about China, there are clear danger signals.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Not As Much Labor Force Slack as Yellen Believes / Economics / Employment
By: EconMatters
Fed Moving Targets
The Fed keeps moving their targets when they originally thought it was a good idea to provide forward guidance for markets, then when that guidance was met, they started moving the targets in order to justify pumpingmore liquidity and stimulus into the financial system for the benefit of the Big Banks.
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Tuesday, August 12, 2014
The De-industrialization of America: “True U.S. Unemployment Rate is 23.2%” / Economics / Unemployment
By: Paul_Craig_Roberts
On January 6, 2004, Paul Craig Roberts and US Senator Charles Schumer published a jointly written article on the op-ed page of the New York Times titled “Second Thoughts on Free Trade.” The article pointed out that the US had entered a new economic era in which American workers face “direct global competition at almost every job level–from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst. Any worker whose job does not require daily face-to-face interaction is now in jeopardy of being replaced by a lower-paid equally skilled worker thousands of miles away. American jobs are being lost not to competition from foreign companies, but to multinational corporations that are cutting costs by shifting operations to low-wage countries.” Roberts and Schumer challenged the correctness of economists’ views that jobs off-shoring was merely the operation of mutually beneficial free trade, about which no concerns were warranted.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Hopelessly Devoted to Inflation / Economics / Inflation
By: Michael_Pento
In the middle of July the stock market finally awoke from its QE-induced coma and realized the Federal Reserve’s tapering, which has been going on for the last six months, was for real. Like a child, who becomes accustomed to a parent that threatens punishment but never follows through, the market had been in denial to the Feds withdrawal of monetary stimulus. But now, thankfully, the ending of Fed asset purchases will be the pin that pops this QE-inflated market and economy. But please do not confuse the end of QE with the Fed actually fighting inflation and selling trillions of dollars’ worth in Treasuries and mortgage backed securities (MBS)…because that will never happen.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
U.S. Economy Nothing New Under the Sun / Economics / US Economy
By: Andy_Sutton
Probably the biggest reason this column has been silent for the past few months is that there has been so much to say; yet there is nothing really new to say. Sometimes I wonder how reporters do it. They write essentially the same story every week or month, but have to come up with different words and flavors. This is likely why the ratings for ‘news’ are so low these days. It isn’t because people have suddenly become adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff; it is just that the news, like most of our world, has become like a soap opera. You can take a few months off, come back, watch an episode or two, and be right back up to speed. Someone will be fighting someone over some doctrine that may or may not have changed.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Growth and Inflation In America: Why Deflation Is Going to Burst Through / Economics / Deflation
By: Jas_Jain
Inflation is a lagging indicator even over a short-term, lagging by 6-12 months with respect to the GDP growth rate when the cyclical turns take place. Long-term inflation pressure has a very long lag time of 6-10 years. In the advanced economies of Western Europe, Japan and the US, where consumption is a big part of the GDP, the biggest contributor to the long-term inflationary pressures is the long-term GDP growth, driven primarily by the end demand, with inflation lagging by several years as businesses adjust to the rapidly accelerating demand, or the rapidly decelerating demand. This is particularly the case with the consumption oriented US economy.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
The Picture of America's Old and Sick Economy / Economics / US Economy
By: Jas_Jain
As I reported in January 2005 ("Debt") the secular growth in the US GDP ended in late 1990s and all the growth since then has been a result of accumulation of the consumption debt (fiscal deficits plus household debt), as opposed to growth based on incomes, savings and investment, and I predicted that this build up in consumption debt would act as a big drag on the future economic growth. Now, the results (based on the latest GDP data with revisions) are in. Figure below shows the annual growth rate for the preceding 7 years (to smooth out the variations due to the business cycles).
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Thursday, August 07, 2014
How U.S. Dollar Destruction Threatens the Global Economy / Economics / Global Economy
By: John_Mauldin
Forbes Editor-in-Chief and longtime friend Steve Forbes leads off this week’s Outside the Box with a sweeping historical summary – and damning indictment – of the “cheap money” policies of the US executive branch and Federal Reserve. Four decades of fiat money (since Richard Nixon and his Treasury Secretary, John Connally, axed the gold standard in 1971) and six years of Fed funny business have led us, in Steve’s words, to an era of “declining mobility, great inequality, and the destruction of personal wealth.”
Monday, August 04, 2014
China Transformation or Bust / Economics / China Economy
By: John_Mauldin
China continues to be front and center on my list of concerns, even moreso than the latest Federal Reserve press release or fluctuation in the Dow (although you should pay attention). I believe China is the single biggest risk to world economic equilibrium, even larger than Japan or Europe. This week my young associate Worth Wray provides us with a keenly insightful essay on what is currently happening in China. I will admit to not having written about China very much in the past five years, primarily because, prior to Worth’s coming to work with me I really had no secure understanding of what was happening there. I know some readers may be surprised, but I really don’t like to write about things I have no understanding of. Worth has helped me focus. (It helps that he studied Mandarin and lived in China for a while, and is obsessed with China.)
Monday, August 04, 2014
Inflation Trumps U.S. Economic Growth / Economics / Inflation
By: Peter_Schiff
With the first half of 2014 now in the books, many investors are happy with the performance thus far, especially given the economic headwinds that few saw coming. The 26% rally in U.S. stocks in 2013 gave way to a more modest 7% gain in the first half of 2014. Most see this as a positive development in a maturing market. But beneath the surface, important trends are emerging that should give investors reasons to re-evaluate their assumptions.