America

Some perspectives on the fascinating economic experiment that is China from Eric Peters, CIO of One Asset Management, as told in his traditional third-person style.

Anecdote: “We’ve become anesthetized to the absurdity of Chinese growth,” said the CIO.

 

The accelerating rate of credit expansion relative to GDP has no precedent. “They’ve run off the cliff so fast that people seem to think they’ll actually make it to the other side.”

 

John Kerry admitted that the United States gives Israel more than half of the aid that we give “to the entire world,” but Israel doesn’t pay attention to anything the U.S. says. Kerry: Every president, Republican and Democrat, has been opposed to settlements – we issue a warning today when we see a new settlement announced. Nothing happens. It’s ignored, a new settlement goes up. New units, new sales. So the issue — Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg: You’re describing a situation in which you have zero leverage.

Continuing his anti-establishment bent, in his latest letter "Red is the new black", Bill Gross first exposes the "current global establishment’s (including Trump’s) overall plan" consisting of 8 simple steps to "solve the global debt crisis" (yes, the sarcasm is oozing), at which point he goes on to say that "it pays to not fight the tiger until it becomes obvious that another plan will by necessity replace it" and adds "that time is not now, but growing populism and the increasing ineffectiveness of monetary policy suggest an eventual transition."

A few days ago we wrote an article asking how stable the world's democracies really were and noted the opinion of at least one Harvard historian who saw extreme risk related to the global wave of anti-establishment sentiment (see "How Stable Are The World's Democracies? - 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red'").  Apparently Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, agrees that the political upheaval from Brexit to Trump to the collapse of the Italian government on Sunday signal the most dangerous time for Western democracies in decades.

US Productivity rose a disappointing 3.1% in Q3 (missing expectations of a 3.3% rise). However, on a year-over-year basis, Q3 saw a second consecutive decline - the first two-quarter decline in US productivity since 1993. Unit labor cost growth slowed in Q3 to 3.00% (with QoQ growth tumbling from 6.2% in Q2 to just 0.7% in Q3).

Actually if one looks at the official table US productivity has notr risen YoY since Q4 2015 - (Q1 0.0%, Q2 -0.3%, Q3 -0.05%)