Gold News
It’s ‘tradition’ (to coin a phrase by the head of the Fed) round these parts to cut through the BS contained within the monthly release of the BoE minutes and let you know what they really mean. Here’s the latest from the minutes of the meeting on 8th-9th May 2013: There had been a number [...]
For some reason people hold up retails sales as the bell weather of the UK economy, as long as people are spending and consuming that must be ‘good’ because retail sales make up the bulk of economic activity, right? Nobody seems to care or mention the ‘how’ is this spending being funded, which for us [...]
We got the CPI numbers for the UK today and whilst they came in lower than expected they are still above the Bank of England’s legally required rate of 2% ‘at all times’. In fact the BoE now hasn’t hit target for 45 months in a row. Imagine how long you would last in your [...]
Whilst some bureaucratic pen-pusher in Whitehall might have been able to make the UK’s double-dip recession go away, he’s having a much harder time creating jobs and is absolutely failing miserably at producing any wage growth of any note in the UK. Today we got the release on the state of the Labour market in [...]
After yesterday’s manufacturing report came out and showed that sector is still in contraction, we got the construction report today. And just like in manufacturing the construction sector is also contracting – for the sixth month in a row no less. From the report: Construction activity falls for sixth successive month Civil engineering remains weakest [...]
After some poor prints at the start of the year (see this) it’s understandable that we’d get a bounce. And that is exactly what has happened with UK manufacturing in April, however it should noted that despite the ‘better than expected’ data, manufacturing is still contracting. From the report: UK Manufacturing PMI at 49.8 in [...]
David Stockman’s new book “The Great Deformation” is a brilliant, penetrating analysis of the present state of the US economy and the US political system, and a detailed account of how the nation got into this mess. The book will upset Democrats and Republicans alike, and quite a few other constituencies as well, which can, [...]
The crypto-currency Bitcoin is still merely a speck on the global monetary landscape. It is young, experimental, and for all we know, it may ultimately fail to break into the monetary mainstream. However, on a conceptual level I am willing to call it a work of genius and arguably the most exciting development in the [...]
Once again an economic data point for the UK disappoints, this time it is the CBI manufacturing data. From the release: New manufacturing orders fell slightly in the three months to April but output increased and firms are expecting orders to grow in the next quarter. That’s according to the latest CBI quarterly Industrial Trends [...]
Remember at the time of the budget Osborne came out and said that he was cutting the UK’s deficit? Well, surprise-surprise, he’s been proven to be dead wrong. Today we got the borrowing figures for March in the UK, which means we can now see what the UK borrowed for the financial year 2012/13. And [...]
