ECONOMICS

Evergrande – once China’s largest real estate developer – was forced to liquidate on January 28th. It was yet another strike against the country’s now flailing real estate market, adding to a growing list of China’s economic worries.

In the charts below, Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley shows two annual metrics related to China’s real estate crisis from 2003 to 2023. The first looks at apartment and commercial property sales using Bureau of Statistics data (more…)

The trend for 'soft' survey data is very much not the friend of the 'soft-landing' or 'goldilocks' narrative peddlers as it slumps from extreme optimism to disappointed pessimism…

Source: Bloomberg

And today saw more of the same as the Chicago MNI tumbled further off the 'weird' spike in November, back into contraction…

Under the hood was ugly:

• New orders fell at a slower pace; signaling contraction (more…)

After declines in job openings accelerated in the latter months of 2023, prompting economists to pat themselves on the back for predicting a soft landing and validating their expectations for Fed rate cuts, moments ago the BLS came out and spoiled the big picture when – instead of doing the market's bidding it confirmed that it responds first and foremost to the Biden admin's political demands – it reported that in December job openings unexpectedly rose, raising the specter of a hard (more…)