With Caixin China PMI numbers today broadly confirming Monday’s official CCP data, the outlook for China and its neighbors remains bright. The general trends shown in the Caixin PMIs reflect those of Japan and South Korea. Manufacturing held steady or gained slightly across Asia in...
The US Purchasing Managers Composite Index (PMI) increased in January to 46.6 from 45 in December, representing a slowing economy but slightly less pessimistic than expected and better than the month before. As a preliminary release for January, this US PMI report gives investors the...
This morning investors were unfortunately treated to a rather disappointing package of October Chinese economic data. Three of the most important hard data series were reported: fixed asset investment, industrial production and retail sales. Each was lower than the previous month and missed expectations, suggesting...
In Part 1 of this series we talked about the lagged effect of interest rates and money growth, AKA "financial conditions" broadly speaking, on economic growth. We noted that changes in interest rates tend to impact economic growth with about a 2 year lag and...
With US stocks up 11% YTD and nearly 19% since the Christmas Eve low, one could surmise that the economic slowdown that occurred in the back half of 2018 both globally and in the United States was a thing of the past, or at least...
Several months ago we wrote that looser financial conditions should support economic data and stocks through year end. So far so good. Since then economic indicators such as the Markit manufacturing PMI have continued to chug higher and US stocks are up about 6%. With...
In today's edition of More Evidence of China Slowing Permeating Asia we will focus on the recently released PMI data. Generally all the data tell a similar story - that there is a synchronized slowdown taking place in Asia - though Japan may be bucking...
From a momentum standpoint, global manufacturing peaked in September 2013 and has been steadily slowing, at least in terms of breadth, since then. In order to understand the global manufacturing sector we have created a variety of diffusion indices using the Markit Manufacturing PMI Data....
Historically, there has been a fairly strong relationship in the trends of German construction output and the results of Markit’s PMI Construction survey....
We had our first look at manufacturing conditions in February (NY Fed Empire Survey came in below consensus by a few points) and tomorrow we have the industrial production report for the US. What should we expect when that report comes out?...
The drop in oil prices has brought up a few questions with respect to who will benefit and who will be negatively impacted. There are regional PMI surveys and Federal Reserve surveys that can help fill in some of the gaps. For example, below is...
Markit’s PMI Manufacturing survey data released today showed little change in euro area countries’ headline readings, as most continued to hover around the all-important 50 level: The largest monthly improvement was in France (~2 points) while Ireland’s survey fell the most (~2 points), and no...
While today’s better than expected rise in the flash PMI indicator (black line) for the euro zone is a welcome surprise, it would seem that it will take quite a bit more improvement before we can reasonably expect substantial progress in the recovery of important...
The US ISM non-manufacturing survey for November was released today and showed an increase of 2.2 points to a robust level of 59.3....
