The gap between long-term and short-term interest rates has narrowed sharply over the last year and is now dipping into negative territory. Historically that’s often been a signal that slower economic growth or even an economic recession could lie ahead.
Gap between average interest rate on 10-year Treasury bond and 3-month Treasury bill during the last month of the quarter (1953:Q2 to 2019:Q1) and May 1-24 for 2019:Q2. NBER dates for U.S. recessions shown as shaded regions.
The world premiere (in chamber version) of the opera composed by Laura Schwendinger, libretto by Ginger Strand with the Left Coast Ensemble. Update with review by SF Classical Voice.
From Spencer Hill/Goldman Sachs “US Daily: Company Views on the Return of the Trade War” [not online].
A year ago, the July 2019 futures were $10.46, compared to $8.296 today.
Reader CoRev writes on July 9th:
…no one has denied the impact of tariffs on FUTURES prices. Those of us arguing against the constant anti-tariff, anti-Trump dialogs have noted this will probably be a price blip lasting until US/Chinese negotiations end. We are on record saying the prices will be back approaching last year’s harvest season prices.
Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. A shorter version appeared in Project Syndicate on May 23rd.
Given recent developments in the use of Section 232 in steel, aluminum, possibly uranium and automobiles, as well as the increasingly expensive bailouts of the ag sector, it behooves us to see some earlier perspectives on the use of such protectionist and interventionist measures, as provided by Peter Navarro.
Today’s Bloomberg article notes that my one-time coauthor Peter Navarro has pushed to have countervailing duty (CVD) investigations augmented with assessments of currency unvervaluation. A prominent target of CVD investigations has been China.
Figure 1: USD/CNY bilateral nominal exchange rate (blue, left inverted scale), and real trade weighted (broad) value of the CNY (red, right scale). May 2019 observation is for first 20 days. Light orange denotes Trump administration. Source: Federal Reserve via FRED, BIS.
Figure 1: Treasury 10yr-3mo spread (blue), 10yr-2yr (red), 5yr-3mo (teal), in %. Source: Fed via FRED, US Treasury.
Figure 2: Treasury 10yr-3mo spread (blue), 10yr-2yr (red), 5yr-3mo (teal), in %, in 2019. Source: Fed via FRED, US Treasury.
Over the last month, the 10yr-3mo spread has averaged 4 bps — so not quite inversion on a monthly basis.
In every single state in the Great Lakes region, save Michigan, manufacturing employment has either peaked or (charitably) gone on a growth hiatus.
