Author Archives: Menzie Chinn

Soybean Watch in the Wake of the Trump-Xi Standstill

On July 12th, 2018, the closing price for a CBOT soybean futures contract expiring on July 12, 2019, was 885.75. As of 1:40PM Central on July 2nd, the price of the July 2019 contract was 877.00, 0.99% difference. In other words, soybean futures are (still) doing pretty well in terms of forecasting.

Figure 1: Price of contract for soybeans futures expiring July 2019 (black line), fifty data moving average (blue line). Source: ino.com accessed 7/2 1:40PM, and author’s annotations.

In other words, despite the Trump-Xi trade truce, soybean prices remain mired at where they were nearly a year ago (which is why I think Brad Setsers’ “standstill” better describes the outcome).

 

 

Chinese GDP Growth: Now and Near Future

I’ve noticed a tendency for some commentators to believe the Chinese economy is about to topple. One such instance is Gordon Chang writing in the National Interest:

Take the year 2016 as an example. The NBS reported that China’s gross domestic product grew 6.7 percent that year. In 2017, however, the World Bank issued a bar chart showing that China’s GDP increased only 1.1 percent

One has to wonder why in 2019 Chang is citing an unspecified 2017 World Bank report regarding 2016 performance. Well, time to — gasp — look at the data.

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The Data Will Make You Free

I am constantly amazed that people write stuff that is easily falsifiable, in an era of easily accessible databases (I am tempted to go into an old fogey rant about “in my day I had to go to the library and hand copy down numbers from the hard copy volumes of International Financial Statistics”…but I will resist). Or ask me for the “raw” data when it’s freely available.

Just to remind the frequent commenters on this blog, there exist freely available data here:

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37 Years Ago Today: “It’s because of you little motherf*****s that we’re out of work!”

On this day, in 1982,  at the height of the hysteria focused on competition from Japan, two unemployed auto workers chased down Vincent Chin — celebrating his bachelor’s party — and beat him senseless with a baseball bat (he subsequently died from his injuries). As we re-establish Camp Sill as an internment/detention/concentration camp (you pick the term), and the deportation campaign — real or imagined — is announced, it’s perhaps time to recall the warning signs:

In context:

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Recession Indicators, June 21

Industrial production, personal income ex-transfers, and Macroeconomic Advisers’ monthly GDP are all below recent peak; manufacturing and trade industry sales and nonfarm payroll employment are still rising (although barely, in the latter case). Here’s a graph of these five indicators.

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