A busier week, with 107 data releases, from which I identified 17 surprises and 20 shocks. Almost half the surprises came from the, and just over half the shocks came from Asia.
To pick three strands from this quite busy week:
On Friday I tried to figure out how the US is managing to avoid a recession you’d think was being mandated by monetary tightening. And there’s something hiding in the monetary data which genuinely surprised me. Despite everything (rising interest rates, massive unrealized bond losses, deposits draining away) the banking system is still releveraging the economy - that’s right, releveraging, not deleverating.
On Thursday, I used Japan’s Ministry of Finance’s massive quarterly survey of c3.8mn private sector balance sheets and p&ls to do a Dupont analysis breakdown of Japan Inc behaviour and results. Mostly it’s steady as she goes (of course), but with Japan’s workers expenses being an ever-smaller proportion of sales.
On Wednesday, I looked at India’s 6.1% yoy 1Q GDP growth, and noted that its showing a very familiar Asian pattern of growth, driven not by consumption, but by rapid investment spending and improvement in net exports. Now, where have we seen that before?
