Business

With the Fed hiking rates in order to signal a "return of confidence" to the economy, one - the most important - aspect of a recovering economy continues to be absent: rising wages.

As the following chart showing the annual growth in wages of production and non-supervisory workers (who make up 83% of the US workforce) reveals, wage growth is not only well below the Fed's goal of 4.5%, at 1.7% it is below the Fed's goal of 2% inflation, suggestion that on a real basis wages would be declining if the Fed had attained its 2% inflation mandate.

It used to be the provenance of "conspiracy theorists" - alleging that central banks have manipulated, rigged or otherwise broken the "efficient market." That is no longer the case.

As we previously showed, now even the big banks admit it.

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares of Sinclair & Co.

The US Economy: Still On Track?

Raw materials and goods need to be transported regardless of how modern or sophisticated an economy is.

Every week the Association of American Railways (“AAR”) posts a free report on rail volumes transported across North America by major category. This provides some decent clues on the condition of the US economy, almost in real time.

Let’s see what the latest report covering virtually all of 2015 is telling us.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that after a period of relative quietness on the European front, something was bound to happen again. Even though it has been less than six months since Greece had to close its banks in an attempt to stop a bank run, it feels like it has been an eternity as the mainstream media chose not to spend too much attention on a fait-divers like a bank run.

Excerpted from JPMorgan CIO Michael Cembalest 2016 Outlook,

Something is wrong with this picture.  In the US and Japan, corporate profits sank during the global financial crisis.  In the US, the profit recovery was accompanied by a recovery in household income.  In Japan, however, corporate profits and household income moved in opposite directions, as dynamics that helped profits recover did not help consumers.