Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
If 2015 was the year in which no investment strategy worked, 2016 is looking like the year in which all economic policies fail. Already, at what should be the blow-off peak of a long expansion, US corporate profits are instead rolling over:
Two months ago, and roughly 6 weeks before the Fed's first rate hike in 9 years, Janet Yellen warned that if the "outlook worsened, the fed might weight negative rates" adding that "negative rates could help encourage banks to lend."
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.