Analysis Topic: Economic Trends Analysis
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
The ECB Ignores The Threat Of Hyperinflation / Economics / HyperInflation
By: Andrew_McKillop
DEFLATION NOW – HYPERINFLATION SOON
What the market expects from Mario Draghi is more of the same QE. The shock fall in annual eurozone inflation to an official rate of just 0.7% in October put the spotlight back on the European Central Bank and its equally-official “target rate” of inflation, of 2%. But Mario Draghi has shown almost no interest in the subject except for one-liners such as: "You can buy more stuff” when inflation is low or zero, his reply to journalists' questions in a June interview on his unsurprising announcement that QE would continue “but didn't seem to be working”.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Inflation Has Not Cured Iceland’s Economic Problems / Economics / Inflation
By: David_Howden
No two countries’ responses have polarized commentators over the past five years more than the contrasting post-crisis policies in Iceland and Ireland.
In a paper published in Economic Affairs (available here as a PDF) I contrast the policies enacted by Iceland and Ireland, perhaps the two countries most affected by the liquidity freeze of 2008. A common conclusion has been that one country did everything right and the other did everything wrong, however, I take a more pragmatic approach. There are some positive aspects in each case, and other aspects we can do without.
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Tuesday, November 05, 2013
China World Bank Rankings That Rankle / Economics / China Economy
By: Steve_H_Hanke
The World Bank has been producing its annual “Doing Business” report since 2004 and its 2014 edition ranking Hong Kong second out of 189 economies surveyed, in contrast to mainland China’s score of 96, hardly seems controversial.
Its rankings of 10 factors reflecting the ease with which entrepreneurs and businesses may conduct economic activity in a given economy offer an unbiased way of looking at business.
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Friday, November 01, 2013
Why U.S. Consumer Confidence is Falling at an Alarming Rate / Economics / US Economy
By: DailyGainsLetter
Mohammad Zulfiqar writes: Consumer spending is very critical to the U.S. economy, as it makes up a significant portion of the gross domestic product (GDP). If consumer spending declines, then U.S. GDP growth becomes very questionable; when it increases, it can provide an idea about where the U.S. economy is heading.
I look at consumer confidence as one of the indicators of consumer spending. The logic behind this is that if consumers are confident, they will most likely spend more, compared to when they are pessimistic.
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Thursday, October 31, 2013
Is Hyperinflation a Real Threat to the U.S. Economy? / Economics / HyperInflation
By: DailyGainsLetter
Mohammad Zulfiqar writes: One of the questions being asked by investors these days is “where’s the inflation?” After the financial crisis and the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government stepped in to help the financial system. As a result, they promised to print money, and thus quantitative easing was born. Banks received billions of dollars in bailout money.
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Thursday, October 31, 2013
A Long-Term Look at Inflation / Economics / Inflation
By: PhilStockWorld
Courtesy of Doug Short: The October 2013 Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) released today puts the September year-over-year inflation rate at 1.18%, less than third the 3.90% average since the end of the Second World War and 51% lower than its 10-year moving average.
For a comparison of headline inflation with core inflation, which is based on the CPI excluding food and energy, see this monthly feature.
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Thursday, October 31, 2013
Documenting the U.S. Federal Reserves Monetary and Economic Failures / Economics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: John_Mauldin
In their third-quarter Review and Outlook – today's Outside the Box – Lacy Hunt and Van Hoisington get right down to telling us why the Federal Reserve's Large Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) program is doomed to failure. (This is a thesis that is dear to my heart, since coauthor Jonathan Tepper and I explore it at length in our just-released book, Code Red.) The Fed scrambled hard and came up with some extraordinary measures to keep the global economy more or less in one piece as the Great Recession unfolded. They had to act fast, and they did; but five years down the road, with sovereign debt balloons swollen near to bursting worldwide, with markets in advanced and emerging nations alike swooning at the mere mention of the word tapering, and with the threat of a major global currency war staring us right in the face, the Fed may have just about r eached the end of its rope. But let's let Lacy and Van explain:
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Bernanke vs. Yellen: A Spooky Economic Outlook? / Economics / US Federal Reserve Bank
By: Axel_Merk
Fed Chair nominee Janet Yellen will take over where her predecessor Ben Bernanke leaves off. Not just operationally, but also philosophically. To understand where the Fed and the U.S. dollar may be heading, we take a closer look at where Bernanke and Yellen are coming from.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
New Retirement Trend: One-Third of Americans Need to Work Until 80 / Economics / Pensions & Retirement
By: Profit_Confidential
Michael Lombardi writes: According to the just-released annual Wells Fargo & Company Middle Class Retirement Study, about 60% of middle-class Americans say that getting monthly bills paid is their top concern. This number stood at 52% in the 2012 study. (Source: Wells Fargo & Company, October 23, 2013.)
But there are more depressing results of the survey…
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Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Four Years of Economic Recovery, So Why Don’t You Feel Richer? / Economics / Economic Recovery
By: Clif_Droke
Statistics can sometimes, as we all know, be very misleading. Take the unemployment report for example. If you examine the numbers out of context, you'd be forced to conclude that workforce participation has steadily increased over the last four years. A behind-the-scenes look at those numbers, however, reveals a startling discovery: most of those gains have occurred because job seekers have simply given up looking for a job.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Economies are Not Destroyed in a Day / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Nicolás Cachanosky writes: Earlier this month, Argentina's leading conservative paper, La Nación published an unsigned editorial comparing the economies of Argentina and Venezuela. The editorial concluded that as economic freedom declines in Argentina, and as Argentina adopts more of what Chavez called “twenty-first century socialism,” it is becoming increasingly similar to Venezuela. Is this true? Will Argentina suffer the same fate as Venezuela where poverty is increasing and toilet paper can be a luxury?
Sunday, October 27, 2013
How to Protect Your Money When the U.S. Debt Bill Comes Due / Economics / US Debt
By: EWI
Dear Reader
Ever heard of a wedding crasher? You know -- that distant “cousin” who shows up uninvited, hangs around the open bar all night, chugs down double-everythings and falls on his butt on the dance floor -- all before mysteriously vanishing and leaving his night of indulgence on the father of the bride’s tab.
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Saturday, October 26, 2013
Peak Prosperity - The Fed Can Only Fail. And We'll All Lose / Economics / US Debt
By: Dr_Martenson
The basic predicament we are in is that the current crop of leaders in the halls of monetary and political power does not appear to understand the dimensions of our situation.
The mind-boggling part about all this is that it's not really all that hard to grasp.
Our collective predicament is simply this: Nothing can grow forever.
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Friday, October 25, 2013
Deflationary Forces Stymie the Fed's Economic Rescue Efforts / Economics / Deflation
By: EWI
See a stunning chart of the Federal Reserve's assets
The Federal Reserve's efforts to rescue the economy have been historically aggressive, starting with the initial round of quantitative easing in 2008 and continuing through 2013.
The central bank's assets have skyrocketed due to the Fed's bond purchases, which you can see clearly in this eye-opening report that Robert Prechter presented to the Market Technicians Association and his Elliott Wave Theorist subscribers.
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Thursday, October 24, 2013
Structural Demographic Trends in U.S. Employment Data / Economics / Employment
By: PhilStockWorld
Courtesy of Doug Short: The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) is a simple computation: You take the Civilian Labor Force (people age 16 and over employed or seeking employment) and divide it by the Civilian Noninstitutional Population (those 16 and over not in the military and or committed to an institution). The result is the participation rate expressed as a percent.
The first chart below splits up the LFPR data since 1948 in two ways: by age and by gender. For the former, I chose the 25-64 age cohorts to represent what we traditionally think of as the “productive” (pre-retirement age) work force. The BLS has data for ages 16 and over, but across this 64-year time frame college attendance has surged dramatically. So I opted for age 25 as the lower boundary to reduce the college-years skew.
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Thursday, October 24, 2013
What’s Really Behind China’s Economic Growth and Why It Won’t Last / Economics / China Economy
By: InvestmentContrarian
Sasha Cekerevac writes: When I read some of the headlines by other news organizations, sometimes I can’t help but chuckle at their oversimplification. Other media outlets take a kernel of truth, and ignore the rest of the picture, only to blow that tiny piece of truth out of proportion.
As an example, there was a recent release by the National Bureau of Statistics of China that reported the Chinese economy grew 7.8% year-over-year for the three months of July to September. (Source: National Bureau of Statistics of China, October 18, 2013.)
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Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Lackluster U.S. Non Farm Payrolls Employment Report Leaves Fed on Hold / Economics / Employment
By: Victoria_Marklew
The sluggish hiring pace visible in the September employment report justifies the Federal Reserve’s decision to postpone tapering of asset purchases. Data for the September report were gathered prior to the government shutdown, but October employment numbers will contain distortions arising from not collecting data during the typical survey period, rendering comparisons difficult.
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Saturday, October 19, 2013
To Save Europe, Free the Markets / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Frank Hollenbeck writes: The current European economic strategy is to kick the can down the road. Debt levels in almost all European countries continue to rise and growth seems to be a long forgotten memory. The day of reckoning is around the corner, as Rudi Dornbush once warned, “[t]he crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought, and that’s sort of exactly the Mexican story. It took forever and then it took a night.”
Sunday, October 06, 2013
U.S. Economy Heading For Another Economic Slump / Economics / Great Depression II
By: Mike_Whitney
“Slumping asset prices show a recession is probably on its way. … Stocks tend to fall more frequently and further than property values, so they are better recession-predictors.” - IMF research paper by economists John C. Bluedorn, Joerg Decressin and Marco E. Terrones.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Warning - Deflation Will Take the Most by Surprise / Economics / Deflation
By: EWI
Google searches offer an insightful glimpse into economic expectations
The last thing on the minds of most people is deflation. It's easy enough to determine that with a quick quiz -- and that quiz is found in the just-published Elliott Wave Theorist.
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