Business

In 60 years, the US economy has not suffered a 16-month continuous YoY drop in Factory orders without being in recession. Moments ago the Department of Commerce confirmed that this is precisely what the US economy did, when factory orders not only dropped for the 16th consecutive month Y/Y, after declining 1.7% from last month...

... but at $454 billion for the headline number, this was the lowest print since the summer of 2011.

Market reaction: stocks rebound on the news and are now well in the green.

While last week's Chicago's PMI staged a strong bounce from its recent contraction and back into expansion, New York did not. ISM New York just printed at 50.4, just barely above the contraction point, and the lowest headline print since mid 2015.

The extremely noisy time series continues to swing, this time lower, with every single underlying component deteriorating in the month of March.

Back in the summer of 2014, when the ECB first unveiled NIRP, many were concerned that this submersion into the monetary policy twilight zone would first crush Europe's money markets. However, at least until now, European MM funds have proven relatively resilient,

The story in Japan is different.

When the Bank of Japan announced they were instituting NIRP back in January, they intended to spur lending and push inflation up. As often is the case with central planners, their academic theory was much different than the economic reality.

Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds

The cartels and state organs are frantically trying to co-op, outlaw, corral or control this disruptive technology.

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