There’s something very wrong with the US jobs market, as the slide above confirms. Commentators professed to be surprised by the disappointing May report last Friday, but its hard to know why: The overall participation rate has been in decline since July 1997, when it reached 68%: today it is only 62.7% Male participation is at […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Surplus chemical industry capacity reaches 26% as demand slows
Global demand is continuing to slow, yet chemical industry capacity is continuing to ramp up. As a result, supply gluts are likely to appear in many key areas as we move into the second half of the year. That is the key conclusion from the latest American Chemistry Council data for global chemical capacity and […]
Central banks head for currency wars as growth policies fail
The world’s central bankers would have been sacked long ago if they were CEOs running companies. They would also have been voted out, if they were elected officials. Not only have they failed to achieve their promised objectives – constant growth and 2% inflation – they have kept failing to achieve them since the Crisis […]
Tokyo, Shanghai stock markets fall; yen rises 8% in 2 weeks
Pity poor Janet Yellen, you might say. The head of the US Federal Reserve told the Senate last week that she had been “quite surprised” by the collapse of oil prices since mid-2014. And she added that the rise of the US$ was similarly “not something that we had expected” (you can see the testimony […]
Markets need more cash from the Janet Yellen tooth fairy
Central banks have acted as the proverbial tooth fairy towards financial markets in recent years. But they have not just left a small amount of money under the pillow when a child lost its first tooth. Instead they have printed trillions of dollars via Quantitative Easing (QE), to persuade investors to buy shares and commodities, […]
Yellen offers hostage to fortune on US growth
Previous chairs of the US Federal Reserve had a poor record when it came to forecasting key events: Alan Greenspan, at the peak of the subprime housing bubble in 2005, published a detailed analysis that emphasised how house prices had never declined on a national basis Ben Bernanke, at the start of the financial crisis […]
US GDP disappoints again as aging Boomers slow the economy
“Year after year we have had to explain from mid-year on why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back.” That was the comment, last August, from the new deputy chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer. This year, he won’t have to wait until mid-year to start the […]
US watchdog warns on today’s “quicksilver markets”
What could go wrong in today’s financial world? Many stock markets in the West are hitting new highs, and central banks are promising they will do nothing to spoil the party. But as Gillian Tett of the Financial Times warned on Friday: “Before anyone gets too thrilled about equities, they should read a sobering research document from […]
Boom/Gloom Index suggests S&P 500 close to its peak
How long can the juggler keep all the balls in the air? That is the question that compels us to stand in the square and watch her skill at work. We have the same fascination watching central bankers at work – they similarly aim to keep financial markets aloft, to create their desired ‘wealth effect’. But we know that […]
US dollar rises as investors worry low-cost money may disappear
Nobody knows how the Great Unwinding of central bank stimulus policies will develop. The world has simply never been in this position before. Thus the senior economics and business correspondent of the Financial Times, John Plender, began an article this week: “In a market where asset prices are comprehensively rigged by central bankers, rational investment […]