A key gauge of US consumer prices posted the second-smallest increase this year while spending accelerated, offering hope that the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes are cooling inflation without sparking a recession. The personal consumption expenditures price index, excluding food and energy, which Fed Chair Jerome Powell stressed this week is a more accurate measure of where inflation is heading, rose a below-forecast 0.2% in October from a month earlier, Commerce Department data showed Thursday. The saving rate fell to 2.3% in October, the lowest since 2005, the Commerce Department report showed.

There was an enormous swing in the trade surplus of the energy-exporting economies, and surprisingly, China’s surplus also has continued to rise. Russia’s surplus is set to top $250 billion. Saudi Arabia’s surplus should top $200 billion. The other monarchies in the Gulf should have a surplus comparable to that of the Saudis—if anything, it will be a bit bigger. Summed up, these autocratic countries’ surpluses should total about $1 trillion in 2022. But there is an important difference between now and then: the big autocratic surplus countries are not adding to their formal foreign exchange reserves. By implication, private financial intermediaries somewhere around the world will need to absorb Treasury bonds. Just as financial intermediaries globally had to absorb U.S. “subprime” (household) risk prior to the global crisis, now they have to absorb U.S. interest rate risk.

The labor economist Arindrajit Dube has estimated hourly wage changes — by decile rather than quartile — over a longer period since the beginning of the pandemic recession. He finds that real wages for the bottom 40 percent of workers have increased. Lower-income families spend a higher than average share of their income on food and energy, which are also the categories that have seen the most inflation recently. My rough calculations suggest that even when you take these food and energy costs into account, lower-income families have done better, not worse, than others, at least in terms of inflation’s effects. But it does lessen that difference somewhat.

Oliver Wyman has constructed a model of demand for stocks that tries to assess the effect of inequality and two other long-running shifts. These are the rise in willingness of pension-fund managers to hold stocks since the 1950s and the easier access to stocks for ordinary investors, both through lower fees and the popularity of funds. This “demand-weighted income” measure is then compared with household equity wealth to come up with something akin to a slow-moving price-to-earnings ratio. A price-to-inequality ratio won’t replace a simple price-to-earnings gauge. Inequality data are slow to be produced, so this can’t be used as a real-time indicator.

The total debt owed by households, businesses, and governments stands at $290 trillion, up by more than one-third from a decade ago, according to research by the Institute of International Finance. Although the world’s debt has declined from a pandemic-driven record early this year, the risks it poses to economies and financial markets are intensifying.

The increases in the Investment Grade Corporate Bond Market Distress Index since the start of the current tightening cycle have been relatively modest. Overall, the IG CMDI has trended sideways recently, with the 2022 peak not substantially above that observed in the 2015 tightening cycle.

FAZ quotes the president of the German federation of industry as saying that more than a fifth of German medium-sized companies they had polled were considering packing up and leaving the country. Despite recent market moves, end-user energy prices will not revert to the pre-war times on a sustained level. What we expect to see in Germany is not so much large de-industrialization but a shift in production technologies. We expect to see a shift away from energy-intensive production, like bulk chemicals and steel, towards lower energy-intensive industrial segments and a shift towards low carbon technologies, in particular, a process that will be accompanied with friction and possibly lower GDP growth.

A record 48,953 deaths in the US, or about 15 fatalities per 100,000 people, were caused by guns last year, said the analysis published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Since 1990, rates of gun-related homicide have been highest among Black men aged 20 to 24, the analysis said, with 142 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 74% increase since 2014. Homicide rates are as much as 23 times higher among Black men, and as much as nearly four times higher among Hispanic men than among white men, the analysis said. Gun fatality rates from suicide were highest among white men aged 80 to 84 years, at 47 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 41% increase since 2007, the analysis showed.

In real terms, the National index is 3.3% below the recent peak, and the Composite 20 index is 4.4% below the recent peak in 2022. In real terms, house prices are still above the bubble peak levels. There is an upward slope to real house prices, and it has been over 16 years since the previous peak, but real prices are historically high. Affordability worsened in September as mortgage rates increased, even though house prices declined.

Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder and once the richest business leader in China, has been living in central Tokyo for almost six months amid Beijing’s continuing crackdown on the country’s technology sector and its most powerful businessmen. Since his fallout with Chinese authorities, Ma has been spotted in various countries, including Spain and the Netherlands. People involved in Japan’s modern art scene said that Ma had become an enthusiastic collector. Friends close to the billionaire in China said he had turned to painting watercolors to pass the time after being forced to retreat from his frenetic public life, jet-setting between meetings with top officials in China and around the globe.

Zhang Xin and her husband Pan Shiyi, who grew Soho China Ltd. into a behemoth that reshaped the country’s skylines, have built a discreet family office. Two of its biggest assets: stakes in the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue Plaza in Midtown. Now, after the implosion of the Chinese property sector, the combined equity value of just these two investments — about half a billion dollars — is roughly the same as the couple’s holding in the Beijing-based company responsible for their wealth. Their five-part strategy — build a successful business in China, list it on a global exchange, pay out billions of dollars in dividends, set up a family office abroad, and buy up foreign real estate — means their fortune is relatively protected while other Chinese billionaires have seen their riches crumble after running foul of President Xi Jinping’s clampdowns.

The exact number of Chinese companies being set up is unclear because Singapore does not disclose the origin country in its public statistics. However, one lawyer said his firm’s internal research division found more than 500 new Chinese companies had set up this year in Singapore, which experts noted was a rise from previous years. Another business advisory group in the city-state that had reviewed the data calculated the number at 400, including family offices, but also asked not to be identified due to the sensitivities involved. Analysts expect the number of family offices — many of which are from China — to be well over 1,000 by the end of this year, compared with 400 at the end of 2020.

While there have been some breathless claims using terms like “uprising” and “revolt,” I think that is an exaggeration of the protests at this stage and that the security services will succeed in nipping them in the bud. But no mistake, the fact that so many were willing to stand up publicly in spite of the likely personal costs is remarkable and meaningful. Still, in spite of how stirring these protests have been, I would be surprised if they continue in any meaningful way, given how much work the system has put into dealing with just these kinds of contingencies and how it has repeatedly demonstrated that when it comes to ensuring political security, there is no bottom line.

The Pentagon said Beijing “probably accelerated” its nuclear expansion last year and was on track to have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear weapons by 2035. The Pentagon said China was also investing heavily in space, including everything from intelligence assets to weapons to counter an adversary, such as kinetic-kill missiles and ground-based lasers. It said China had more than 260 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) satellite systems, which marked an almost doubling since 2018. US officials say China has shown no willingness to engage in any talks about nuclear weapons.

When inflation is low, people and companies simply do not think about it and thus do not react to it. This was certainly the case pre-Covid. When it becomes higher, however, inflation becomes salient, wage and price decisions become more sensitive to it, and inflation expectations become more easily de-anchored. The question is, what rate of inflation leads to salience? A hint is given in a recent paper, which looks at Google searches for “inflation” as a function of the actual inflation rate. It found that, for the US, if inflation was around 3-4%, people simply did not pay attention. Above 3-4%, they did. Altogether, these arguments have led me to conclude that, while a higher inflation target is desirable, the right target for advanced economies such as the US might be closer to 3% than our original 4% proposal.

Yields on longer-term US Treasurys have fallen further below those on short-term bonds than at any time in decades, a sign that investors think the Federal Reserve is close to winning its inflation battle regardless of the cost to economic activity. Last week, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note dropped to 0.78 percentage points below that of the two-year yield, the largest negative gap since late 1981, at the start of a recession that pushed the unemployment rate even higher than it would later reach in the 2008 financial crisis.

While the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil for immediate delivery has dropped almost 18% since the middle of July, energy stocks, as encapsulated by the Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund (XLE), have jumped more than 32% in the same time frame.  Two main factors seem to be behind the divergence: 1) Energy earnings have been recovering, with the sector claiming the highest percentage of companies reporting earnings above estimates in the most recent quarter, according to Factset data, and 2)  Brent crude has flipped into contango for the first time since December 2021.

[The Census Bureau defines stay-at-home males] as husbands in opposite-sex marriages with children under 15 who specifically say they’re not working so that they can care for family and whose wives are either working or looking for work. Under those terms, men accounted this year for 5% of the one-fifth of US families with a stay-at-home parent, up from about 1% in the mid-’90s and representing 239,000 fathers. According to a broader analysis by the Pew Research Center—which expands the pool to include any father of a child under 18 who hasn’t been working, regardless of reason or marital status, and also incorporates men in same-sex relationships—the number of stay-at-home dads had swelled to about 2.1M by 2021, equal to 18% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989.

According to a Tax Policy Center estimate, some 74 million tax filers—or nearly half (48.3%) of all filers in 2021—had no income tax liability. Can we have a sustainable tax system if the number of nonpayers continues to grow? Expanding the child tax credit would take our redistributionist tax code to a new level. Although 2021 was a pandemic year, it gives us a picture of what that world would look like. The child tax credit is a drain not only on the federal budget but on the nation’s economy. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation economic models predict that the policy would reduce the labor supply by 0.2% over a decade and the amount of capital by 0.4%. As a result of the reduced supply of labor and capital investment, gross domestic product would shrink by 0.2%.

Whereas nationally, 86% of white 4th graders were at least on grade level in mathematics, this was true for only 55% of black students. As students progressed to the 8th grade, the share performing at grade level or better fell by 15% (86 to 74%) for white students nationally. Among black students, the decline was 30% nationally (from 55 to 38%) and among black students in the [poorest-performing cities poorest performing cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia)] (28 to 20%). A Brookings Report found that in 2019, only 7% of black test-takers scored at least 600 on the math portion of the SAT exam. By contrast, 11%, 31%, and 62% of Latino, white, and Asian test-takers, respectively, did that well.

Lithium demand is expected to jump more than fivefold by the end of the decade. EV sales targets for 2030 are probably unachievable because of constraints on various raw materials, according to Piper Sandler & Co. New lithium mines can cost as much as $1 billion and take more than six years to build, too slow for the sector’s needs, Piper analysts wrote in a November note. And BloombergNEF predicts shortages of lithium will be a problem until 2026 for companies that refine the products into chemicals used in EV batteries.

We quantify firms’ regulation compliance costs from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor input expenditure to comply with government rules. Detailed establishment-level occupation data, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment’s wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. Regulatory costs account, on average, for 1.34% of the total wage bill of a firm but vary substantially across and within industries and have increased over time. We investigate the returns to scale in regulatory compliance and find an inverted-U shape, with the percentage of regulatory spending peaking for an establishment size of around 500 employees.

Housing now dominates—accounting for more than half of service inflation pressure over 3 months. It is expected that housing will take time to reflect past rent increases still, but at the margin, the housing sector is already softening—which should hit Core CPI in about 12 months. Medical services distorted service inflation downward—something unlikely to be repeated in coming months. Overall, the October print doesn’t yet provide confidence that disinflation has spread from durables to services.

A couple of notes about [the above] chart: I show rates of rent growth [reported by Zillow] over a three-month period, a practice many economists have converged on in recent discussions: Monthly data are too noisy, but annual growth rates lag too far behind a rapidly changing economy. I also show inflation in the average rental rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (labeled official rent above.) As you can see, the rental surge of 2021-22 was quite spectacular, with rents rising at double-digit rates for about a year and a half. But it has leveled off recently. Zillow’s index (a three-month average) fell in October; other private measures, like those published by Realtor.com and Apartmentlist.com, have been signaling rent declines for two or three months.

The bond market is zeroing in on a US recession next year, with traders betting that the longer-term trajectory for interest rates will be down even as the Federal Reserve is still busy raising its policy rate. Long-dated Treasury yields are already below the Fed’s overnight benchmark range -- currently 3.75% to 4% -- and there’s still an extra percentage point of central bank increases priced in for the coming months. Demand for Treasuries with longer tenors this week dragged the rate on 10-year and 30-year securities below the lower bound of the Fed’s overnight range. With front-end rates holding relatively steady, that’s seen an intensification of the most pronounced yield curve inversion in four decades -- a widely watched indicator of potential economic pain to come.

US job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree were 41% in November, down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. Degree requirements dropped even more early in the pandemic. They have grown since then but remain below pre-pandemic levels.

On average, 53% of Americans aged over 65 spend more than eight hours of waking time on their own every day, according to my analysis of data from the American Time Use Survey. The trend remains unchanged for people over 60. But compared with a decade ago, the rise in the number of young people who spend more than eight hours on their own is alarming. Time on your own is one thing; feeling lonely is quite another. And young people seem worse affected by the latter. A March 2022 ONS survey found that 40% of women aged 16 to 29 in the UK report “feeling lonely often, always or some of the time,” compared with 22% of women over 70. For men, some 22% of this age group report feeling lonely, compared with 13% of the over-70s. And, of course, the impact of Covid lockdowns cannot be ignored.

At least 10 cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Chengdu, were shaken by rare political protests over the weekend, triggering clashes with police and security officers that led to a spate of detentions. The sudden outbreak of civil disobedience was sparked by outrage after a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, was partly blamed on coronavirus restrictions. While most of the protests appeared to have been stamped out by Monday, they followed months of frustration, especially among China’s young people, with relentless lockdowns, quarantines, mass testing, and electronic surveillance under Xi’s zero-Covid policies.

The popular deglobalization narrative simply isn't in China's trade data -- manufacturing exports are up massively, and that has pushed the surplus up even as China's commodity import bill reached record levels (the commodity bill is poised to fall now, by the way.) China's currency is (still) managed (in my judgment, even if the PBOC's reported reserves don't change,) so movements reflect the interaction of market pressure and political decisions. But at some level, a weaker CNY, even with a massive trade surplus, reflects a judgment by China's policymakers that they need to sustain the rise in exports (relative to China's GDP) even as global demand for manufactures drops (to offset China's domestic weakness.)

Washington’s top telecommunications regulator has barred China-based Huawei and ZTE from selling equipment in the US, citing national security concerns in a move that could further fuel tensions with Beijing. The Federal Communications Commission announced the step on Friday, saying it was the latest effort by US authorities to “build a more secure and resilient supply chain” in the telecommunications industry. “The action we take today covers base station equipment that goes into our networks. It covers phones, cameras, and WiFi routers that go into our homes. And it covers rebranded or ‘white label’ equipment that is developed for the marketplace. In other words, this approach is comprehensive,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, chair of the FCC.

The flow of weapons to Ukraine is now running up against the longer-term demands of a US strategy to arm Taiwan to help it defend itself against a possible invasion by China, according to congressional and government officials familiar with the matter. The backlog of deliveries, which was more than $14 billion last December, has grown to $18.7 billion. Included in the backlog is an order made in December 2015 for 208 Javelin antitank weapons and a separate one at the same time for 215 surface-to-air Stinger missiles. None of them have arrived on the island, according to congressional sources and people familiar with the matter. Executives at Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., and other defense companies say pandemic-driven supply-chain problems have set back production for many systems and that they have struggled to keep up with orders even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine boosted demand.

Nine months ago, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Olaf Scholz declared a Zeitenwende — a turning point — for Germany’s military and its place in the world. But since then, barely any of the €100bn in extra funding the German chancellor pledged has made its way to the armed forces. The parliamentary body set up in the spring to allocate money to modernization and reform programs has met once. The defense ministry had no procurement proposals to submit to it. Its next sitting will not be until February.  Far from rising, the 2023 defense budget, opposition leader Friedrich Merz noted, was set to shrink by €300mn based on current government plans. The lack of German action was “[giving] rise to considerable distrust” at NATO and in allied capitals, he claimed.

The polarization in favor of the biggest firms peaked at the end of last year. The megacap-to-midcap ratio of market cap has been cut from four to three in the course of 2022. But three is far from a collapse of the megacap boom. The 10-15% that was normal until 2016 has since given way to 30-35% of total capital controlled by the megacaps. I have used biweekly rolling averages for the graph. Note that this is a bottom-up census rather than an estimate. I am just adding up reliable third-party data at the granular level; every single ticker for which there is price and market cap data. This is the broadest possible universe of US equities for which I can find kosher data.

We find that slow- and fast-moving components of the atmospheric circulation interacted, along with regional soil moisture deficiency, to trigger a 5-sigma heat event. Its severity was amplified by ~40% by nonlinear interactions between its drivers, probably driven in part by land-atmosphere feedback catalyzed by long-term regional warming and soil drying. Since the 1950s, global warming has transformed the peak daily regional temperature anomaly of the event from virtually impossible to a presently estimated ~200-yearly occurrence. Its likelihood is projected to increase rapidly with further global warming, possibly becoming a 10-yearly occurrence in a climate 2 °C warmer than the pre-industrial period, which may be reached by 2050.

In the US, the earlier spike in lower-end wages relative to other workers' pay has completely stopped, while the split between labor income and profits has, if anything, moved in favor of investors. For better or worse, the popular and elite reactions to the inflation outbreak suggest that policymakers are not going to respond to future downturns the way they did to the pandemic. Soft budget constraints do not appear to be on the menu. And while there have been some constructive increases in public investment (and military spending) in the major economies, they do not seem large enough to move the needle. Financial markets may be wrong, but it is noteworthy that longer-term forward real interest rates are well within their post-financial crisis range, even if they have jumped over the past 12 months.

Covid-19 cases in China are spiraling towards record highs, forcing officials to lock down again large swaths of the country. The world's second-biggest economy reported almost 28,000 new Covid cases on Tuesday, with outbreaks in Beijing, the southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, and the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing continuing to grow. Covid restrictions have hit areas responsible for one-fifth of China's gross domestic product. Officials in Beijing shut most non-essential businesses in the city's largest district, Chaoyang, which has a population of 3.4mn, and have closed restaurants and other entertainment venues in much of the city while telling residents to work from home.

We can observe that the gap [between the deposit rate and the Fed funds rate] is negative when rates are near zero (and deposit levels are high) and positive when rates rise. As a consequence, post-GFC and before the 1994 tightening, deposits were more attractive to depositors, and deposit supply was high relative to loans. However, as rates rise, the gap increases, depositors move elsewhere, banks raise their rates, and cumulative deposit betas rise. Since the 1990s, the response of deposits to monetary policy has been attenuated. This can be explained by the growth in deposits over the post-crisis period relative to investment opportunities.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously argued that "monetary actions affect economic conditions only after a lag that is both long and variable." Historically, housing starts begin to decline within two years of a Fed hike. New home construction fell by 24% from the Fed increase in March to July. Declines in home construction that follow Fed rate increases can take years before they bottom out.

There is typically a meaningful increase in equity expected returns (shown below in excess of cash) before the turn in the market because investors need to be incentivized back into equities and out of safe assets following significant losses. Today, based on our read, the re-rating of equity prices has a way to go. Our estimate for long-term excess expected returns remains relatively low compared to history. Consistent with that, analyst consensus for long-term corporate cash flow growth has barely budged over the last year, not yet reflecting the cooling of the economy we expect to see.

Total debt declined $6.4 trillion in the three months through September, to about $290 trillion, the IIF said in its quarterly Global Debt Monitor published Tuesday in Washington. That drop is amplified by the surging dollar, which makes loans denominated in other currencies look smaller when they’re measured in greenbacks. As a share of the world economy, debt has dropped to 343% -- about 20 percentage points below its pandemic peak last year. Soaring inflation in many economies has helped erode debt burdens measured against the size of economic output because the nominal value of gross domestic product has risen rapidly.

The Inflation Reduction Act will lead to benefit cuts and premium increases for seniors. We estimate that beginning in 2025, plan subsidies—specifically, the reinsurance subsidies for the beneficiaries with the most drug spending—will be cut $30 billion, out of revenue that currently totals about $110 billion. With $30 billion less to finance prescription benefits, something will have to give. Traditional Medicare members face a difficult choice in 2025: either take drastic cuts in drug coverage or switch to Medicare Advantage plans that cover prescriptions but may not cover the hospitals and doctors who are currently providing them care.

Once [the economic boost from pandemic aid fades away,] we’ll probably be back where we were before the pandemic, with weak private investment demand holding interest rates down. Last time I wrote about this I stressed demography — the drastic slowdown in growth of the working-age population — plus what looks like disappointing rates of technological progress. Let me now put it a different way. [The macroeconomic accelerator effect] tells us that investment spending will only remain high if we expect rapid economic growth. And what we know now doesn’t support that expectation. What all this suggests to me is that the era of cheap money is not, in fact, over. A few years from now, we’ll probably be back to a situation in which too much saving is chasing too few investment opportunities, and interest rates will be revisiting their old lows

Headed into the third quarter of this year, households still had about $1.2 trillion to $1.8 trillion in “excess savings”—the amount above what they would have saved had there been no pandemic. Economists’ estimates for how much consumers have left vary. JPMorgan Chase & Co. put the hoard at about $1.2 to $1.8 trillion in the third quarter and said it could be entirely spent by the second half of next year. Goldman Sachs economists estimate households have drawn down about 25% of excess savings and will have spent about 60% by the end of 2023. Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics, puts it at $1.3 trillion and estimates that at the current rate of rundown, that could last another year or so.

The economic impact of higher rates is mixed because it also subsidizes consumption by increasing private sector interest income from public sector liabilities. While private sector interest expenditures merely redistribute income among private actors, public sector interest rate expenditures increase the overall spending power of the private sector. If rates are higher for longer, the interest payments will easily exceed $1t next year. The aggressive rate hikes have thus far appeared to have a limited effect on dampening inflation. With the policy rate much closer to the terminal rate than 0% and financial markets stabilizing, the stock effect of monetary policy appears to be waning. If the flow effects are mixed, then the current policy stance may not be effective in moving inflation back to 2%

The most important of those implications would seem to be that the Federal Reserve’s policy-making committee was behind the curve when it started raising interest rates in March — a year after rents on new leases started exploding — and could end up late again in pivoting to easier monetary policy long after rents have started to fall. I ran the idea of switching to a new-leases rent measure by Princeton economist and former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, who wrote an influential paper in 1980 urging the switch to owner’s equivalent rent. He emailed, “For most purposes, making that change would be a terrible idea. It would reflect the prices paid by a small, and not representative, minority.  That said, if the BLS (or anyone) wants to create a leading indicator of inflation, using rents on new leases would be quite sensible.”

60% of young men in America with less than high-school education have been arrested at least once by age 26.  Strikingly, the report’s author James P. Smith found that the arrest rate has increased dramatically over time. Black men were significantly more likely to have been arrested. Of black men aged 26-35 in the study, 33% had been arrested by age 26 versus 23% for white men. Education plays an outsized role in explaining racial arrest differences, especially for men in the 26–35 age group. The overall higher rate of arrests by 26 among black adults in the 26–35 age group correlates with lower education levels. The study also found that having a more educated father was associated with lower rates of arrests and convictions by 26.

Figure 1 shows the cumulative total returns posted by the S&P 500 Index, the MSCI China Index, and the MSCI India Index from December 31, 1992, through April 20, 2022. Our clients have been uniformly surprised that China’s long-term performance has been so much lower than that of the US and India, especially given all the investor focus on China in recent years. And they’ve been even more surprised that India – a market many clients have more or less ignored – has fared so well over the long run.

Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we find evidence that participation [in Made In China 2025] enables firms to receive more innovation subsidies, which appears to induce increases in R&D intensity. However, there is no evidence that participation increases domestic and foreign patenting, labor productivity, TFP, or profitability of participating firms, suggesting the most important goals of the policy are still unrealized. There is no statistically significant evidence (at a 5% significance level) of positive effects of the “Made in China 2025” initiative on total subsidies, Chinese invention patents, US utility patents, log labor productivity, TFP, and profit margin.

Japan added two more vessels to its fleet of Aegis-equipped destroyers, raising to eight the number of ships capable of intercepting ballistic missiles. Two Maya-class Aegis destroyers, the Maya and the Haguro, successfully intercepted mock ballistic missiles during tests off the coast of Hawaii earlier this month, the Defense Ministry said Monday. In addition, the Maya fired the Standard Missile-3 Block 2A, the interceptor missile developed by the US and Japan. This marks the first time a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force vessel launched an interceptor from the state-of-the-art Block 2A system.

Among China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions, 13 reported more deaths than births last year. Those 13 comprised the wealthy regions of Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Tianjin; the central provinces of Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan, and Hubei; Hebei, Shanxi, and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region in the north and northwest; and the northeastern rust-belt provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang. China has shined a bit more light on its demographic crisis, with newly released figures showing that more than a third of its provinces saw their populations shrink last year. Chinese mothers gave birth to just 10.62 million babies in 2021 – an 11.5% decline from 2020.

I don't think there has been much of a shift in global supply chains out of China. If you trust the Chinese data -- the Chinese data here may be better, as the US data is influenced by tariff avoidance -- US imports from China are slightly higher (as a share of GDP) than before the trade war. China's overall data tells a story of the reglobalization of China's economy after the pandemic. Exports to GDP had been trending down from 2010 to 2018 -- but have moved up strongly in the past year. And there is no sign that the G-7 has already decoupled from China as a source of supply! (imports from China have boomed in the last 3 years) So decoupling, in my view, is a forecast -- not a current reality. The pandemic increased the world's reliance on China as a source of manufactured supply and increased China's reliance on exports for demand!

Since the early 1990s, the Misery Index has only been higher during the 2007-09 recession and its aftermath and for a couple of months in 2020 during the early lockdowns. Importantly, though, the two factors didn't necessarily carry the same weight, as the Misery Index implies. [Andrew Oswald, a professor at the University of Warwick, found that] a 1-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate had an equivalent impact on happiness as a 1.97-point increase in the inflation rate. [If Oswald] were to construct a Misery Index, he would make a simple modification: Multiply the unemployment rate by two and add it to the inflation rate. His index was 20% in 2010 and 15.1% now. By putting extra weight on unemployment, the index helps explain why 2010 was so much worse for Democrats.

Masayoshi Son personally owes SoftBank close to $5bn because of growing losses on the Japanese conglomerate's technology bets, which have also rendered the value of his stake in the group's second Vision Fund worthless. The billionaire's ballooning personal liabilities, discovered through a Financial Times analysis of SoftBank's recent filings, comes as the world's biggest tech investor was hammered by plunging tech stocks and valuations in private companies over the past year.

One way to think about the relationship between the great Big Tech stocks and the broader market is by comparing the equal-weight S&P index — where the performance of every stock counts the same — to the plain vanilla S&P, which is [weighted by market capitalization.] The performance of the equal-weight index is the light blue line in the chart above, [with a dark blue line for the market cap weighted index.] What that chart shows, in short, is the performance of a few [large cap] stocks, mostly the Big Techs, dragging the index around. But in the most recent rally, things have changed meaningfully, as seen from the extreme right part of the chart. Since the beginning of October, the equal-weight index has outperformed, and the index has risen. The market has rallied without Big Tech.

Throughout most of the 2010s, the dominant state for the US banking system was low-interest rates, large amounts of Quantitative Easing, weak credit creation, and low inflation. Now, however, commercial banks face a different challenge. Since the start of Quantitative Tightening, we have seen financial conditions worsening, increasing interest rate volatility, and rising long-term interest rates—so the program is likely having some of its intended effects (although it's hard to disaggregate the effects of short-term rate hikes and signaling against the actions of QT).

Most of the nation's political leaders show little concern or even awareness that the federal government's net financial position has eroded rapidly in this century. They know about mounting public debt because regular budget reports highlight it, as do media outlets. Less well-known or understood is the growth of the government's unfunded liabilities, which, if anything, should be more alarming. With Social Security and Medicare included in the assessment, the federal government's unfunded liabilities in 2021 are $93.1 trillion, or nearly 400 percent of annual GDP. That compares with $11.1 trillion as calculated in the 2001 Treasury report, which was 105 percent of GDP.

Underlying metrics confirmed that this time might really be the peak, in a way they conspicuously failed to do earlier this year when core CPI last seemed to have started a descent. The chart shows the “trimmed mean” inflation produced by the Cleveland Fed that excludes the biggest outliers in either direction from the index’s components and takes the average of the rest; and the “sticky” inflation measure produced by the Atlanta Fed, which looks only at the goods and services whose prices are hardest to change. In practice, when these measures rise, it’s taken as a sign that inflationary pressure is gaining strength; it’s good to see that while both remain very elevated, the trimmed mean has dipped slightly, while sticky price inflation is unchanged.

The news of the moment is that inflation might--might--be peaking. I just present the CPI to make the point, but there seems to be a lot of news suggesting that inflation is easing off. Newer theory, which primarily uses rational (better, forward-looking or model-consistent) rather than adaptive expectations, says that inflation is stable under an interest rate target. It follows that inflation can go away all on its own, even with interest rates substantially below inflation. With fiscal theory + rational expectations, we are having a burst of inflation to devalue government debt, as a response to the 2020-2021 fiscal blowout. But once the price level has risen enough to bring the real value of debt back, it’s over. Until the next shock hits. If inflation fades away despite interest rates below the inflation rate, we have a rather striking confirmation of this rational expectations view, with stable inflation, relative to the traditional spiral-away view. So, are we headed there? It’s too soon for this cautious commenter to declare victory, but I am willing to provide context and say I’m watching anxiously!

Republicans literally outnumbered Democrats, according to the AP’s VoteCast. And yet Democrats still won. What’s really unique about this midterm cycle is that Republicans created a radical policy change — and one that was quite unpopular — without controlling the presidency or the legislature. And that allowed Democrats to plausibly run as the party that was going to make less change than the opposition, which is a super-unusual situation. In our ad testing, messaging about reproductive rights tested very well. Dobbs had an immediate impact on election outcomes. If you look at special elections before and after the decision, Democrats did much better in the latter. And the percentage of primary voters who were Democrats increased by about 2.7 percent after Dobbs. So I think Dobbs was really the major factor.

Wages are still rising too fast to be consistent with the Fed’s inflation target, but if the economy is really set to weaken, wage growth will probably weaken too. Furthermore, you can argue that past wage growth, like surging rents, partly reflected a one-time adjustment to pandemic-related shocks, which will go away over time. I’d argue, a strong case to be made that there’s considerable future disinflation already in the pipeline. Over the past year, optimists like me were wrong, while pessimists were right. But past results are no guarantee of future performance.

The crisis of inflation should not be wasted. A bright spot in the dismal inflation period of the 1970s was the collaboration of Stephen G. Breyer (then counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and the Carter administration on airline deregulation. In this era, high inflation should be a spur to regulatory changes — from addressing Jones Act increases in shipping costs, to strategic tariffs, to rules that force oil and gas to be transported via truck rather than pipeline, to punitive zoning restrictions — that will both reduce prices and make the economy work better. Regaining price stability at as low a cost as possible is far from sufficient to maximize American economic performance, but it is necessary.

Household, nonfinancial corporate and small-business sectors ran a surplus of total income over total spending equal to 1.1% of gross domestic product in the quarter of April to June, according to economists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Using a three-year average, the measure is healthier than on the eve of any U.S. recession since the 1950s. U.S. households still have around $1.7 trillion in savings they accumulated through mid-2021 above and beyond what they would have saved if income and spending had grown in line with the prepandemic economy, according to estimates by Fed economists. Around $350 billion in excess savings as of June were held by the lower half of the income distribution, or around $5,500 per household on average.

Treasury securities with similar characteristics are trading at larger-than-normal price differences. Major players, including the big banks and asset managers that have long been significant buyers, are in retreat. One problem is a growing difference between yields on the newest Treasurys in the market and older vintages that are still traded among investors. Theoretically, a five-year note sold this year should trade at the same yield as a five-year-old 10-year note, because both come due in 2027. But fresh Treasurys are trading at a growing premium to older notes, a sign the older securities have become harder to find buyers for.

It took Jacob Rothman two decades to build a Chinese manufacturing business with his friends and family. Now the 49-year-old American executive says customers want him to make some of his grilling tools and kitchen products elsewhere. He knows it isn’t going to be easy. “There’s not a customer that we have that isn’t pressuring us, suggesting, hoping that we will build factories outside of China,” says the co-chief executive of Velong Enterprises Co., which has six factories in mainland China and serves big retailers and consumer brands such as Walmart Inc. and grill maker Weber Inc. Yet “there’s nothing like China,” he added. “We’ve built this supply chain for 30 years to work like a Swiss clock. There’s just nothing like it.”

Decoupling won't be easy because there is a reason China-based manufacturers are so "competitive" internationally. Chinese subsidies to manufacturers – not just direct but, especially, indirect – are far greater than those of any other country. The extent of these subsidies explains China's huge domestic imbalances and the persistent weakness in its domestic demand. Manufacturers are in China because as long as China subsidies them directly and indirectly, with constant (and expensive) upgrades to energy, transportation, logistical and communications infrastructure, they can effectively produce more cheaply in China than elsewhere. Even rising Chinese wages won't matter because as long as the total income of Chinese workers – and households more generally – doesn't exceed, or even lags, the growth in total production, China will always be a relatively "low wage" economy.