End of week spreads:
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Off a Cliff
NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee key indicators. Consumption (preliminary) falls markedly.
Weekly Macro Indicators – Growth at about Trend
For data available through 2/15. New datapoints tomorrow, for data available through 2/22.
Conference Board: “Pessimism about the future returned”
Conference Board index at 98.3 vs. 102.7 Bloomberg consensus, down from upwardly revised 105.3. Here is a picture of (standardized) U.Michigan Sentiment, Conference Board and Gallup Confidence measures.
EPU Today: 655
A big jump:
The 50th anniversary of Alice Rivlin’s tenure as the founding director of CBO
From the CBO website:
“so called economists at the Fed”
That’s EJ Antoni talking on something called Wealthion at minute 3:30.
Policy Uncertainty in the US, Globally
as measured by Baker, Bloom and Davis’s EPU. I was in Europe, and conversations were in high gear about how things now seemed. And text mining confirms:
AP: “Trump begins firings of FAA air traffic control staff just weeks after fatal DC plane crash”
Article here.
The Russian Economy: How Many Contingent Liabilities?
It seems like a funny question to ask given Russian government debt to GDP isn’t that large. Craig Kennedy argues that taking into account forced bank lending means that (contingent) government liabilities are much larger than conventionally-defined public liabilities (report here). The summary: