Rising oil prices traditionally boost inflation expectations and US interest rates. The May futures contract for light sweet crude oil is up today for the sixth consecutive session. It has risen 11 of the past...
How many jobs do robots – whether mechanical robots or software – destroy? Do these destroyed jobs get replaced by the Great American Economy with better jobs? That’s the big discussion these days. The answers...
A week ago, after nine Fed officials had spoken, the market widely expected Yellen and Fischer to confirm that the table was set for a rate hike later this month. They did, and the dollar...
The conventional narrative is that in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, the economic and political elites in Europe and America are in dispute. They simply not delivered the goods, namely a rising living...
The New York Fed, in its Household Debt and Credit Report for the fourth quarter 2016, put it this way today: “Household debt increases substantially, approaching previous peak.” It jumped by $226 billion in the...
Investors are anxiously awaiting more details on the new US Administration’s economic policies and priorities. Part of the challenge is that the cabinet represents a wide range of views and it is not clear where...
Fulfilling his campaign promise, President Trump has pulled the US out of the ambitious free trade deal negotiated by his predecessor Obama. Analysts view China as the prime beneficiary of the US’ abandonment of TPP....
China’s producer prices – which measure what is sometimes called “inflation at the factory” – soared 5.5% in December, from a year ago. This was far hotter than economists had expected, though they’d expected a...
The US economy created roughly nine million net new jobs since the start of 2009. Through organic growth and acquisition, majority-owned affiliates of US multinational companies have also expanded their employment outside the US. It is...
China is important to US companies. Qualcomm gets 57% of its revenues in China, Micron 43%, Apple 23%, Jabil 21%, Boeing 13%, Wynn Resorts 60%, according to Bloomberg’s math. In the last earnings report, GM...
On December 8, Japanese government revised its GDP statistics to conform to the latest standard of national accounts, SNA2008. Before the revision, Japan was one of the last countries, among OECD members not to be...
The systematically depreciating yuan and the house price bubbles in Chinese cities have made the elite nervous. Capital flight has become a priority. Dodging government limits on capital flight has turned into an art. And buying properties...