{"id":194751,"date":"2008-08-21T17:23:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-21T22:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/21\/economics-update-387\/"},"modified":"2008-08-21T17:23:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-21T22:23:00","slug":"economics-update-387","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/08\/21\/economics-update-387\/","title":{"rendered":"Economics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ummm&#8230;.This is not a day for pleasant economic news.<\/p>\n<p>First, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601068&amp;sid=a37O.tbVC1c8&amp;refer=home\">Leading Economic Indicators indicate a bigger slowdown than anticipated<\/a>, dropping 3x more than expectations, and then <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601068&amp;sid=apGkr_tUxegQ&amp;refer=home\">the Philly Fed index fell for the 9th straight month<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Employment isn&#8217;t good either. While <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/id\/26327709\">new unemployment claims fell, the 4 week rolling average rose<\/a>, and in any case at 432,000 claims (seasonally adjusted, which is the elephant in the room), it&#8217;s still too damn high.<\/p>\n<p>If you are a monetarist, then we have more bad news, because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/money\/main.jhtml?xml=\/money\/2008\/08\/19\/cnusecon119.xml\">the growth rate for M3 has dropped off a cliff<\/a> (chart pr0n below):<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/pic60.picturetrail.com\/VOL1689\/10590113\/20372800\/331225638.jpg\" \/><br \/>Note that this is a graph or the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">rate of growth<\/span>, not the money supply, so the effect on the overall money supply is less than it appears, but, &#8220;As a rule of thumb, the data gives a one-year advance signal on economic growth, and a two-year signal on future inflation.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The chart is a rolling 3 month average of the annual rate, and the rate for May-July is 2.1%, indicating a contraction of the M3 money supply in real terms, which would suggest downward pressure in housing and financial markets.<\/p>\n<p>We also have the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601087&amp;refer=home&amp;sid=adS1jGB9mmq8\">Reuters\/Jefferies CRB Index of commodities making the biggest weekly jump in over 30 years<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/08\/21\/markets\/oil\/\">oil up by 6 bucks<\/a>, along with the <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/08\/21\/markets\/dollar\/index.htm\">dollar falling<\/a> which seems to indicate that the past few weeks might just have been profit taking&#8230;a breather before an ascent to the summit, though <br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/08\/21\/news\/economy\/fuel\/index.htm\">gasoline is down over a dollar today<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ummm&#8230;.This is not a day for pleasant economic news. First, the Leading Economic Indicators indicate a bigger slowdown than anticipated, dropping 3x more than expectations, and then the Philly Fed index fell for the 9th straight month. Employment isn&#8217;t good either. While new unemployment claims fell, the 4 week rolling average rose, and in any &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1080,973,975,1135,1004,1200,1089],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currency","category-economy","category-employment","category-energy","category-finance","category-inflation","category-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194751"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}