ECONOMICS

By Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves

The death of Convoy has been one of the biggest stories in both tech and freight media over the past week. While the freight market has suffered a number of major shutdowns, few were as sudden as Convoy’s. 

After all, Yellow was a much bigger company, but it died a very slow death, and because it was a publicly traded company, we all got to watch its journey on life support for many years. Convoy’s story, on the other hand, offers a cautionary (more…)

Two days ago, markets exhaled a collective breath of relief when China published its monthly data dump which disclosed that in addition to beating (almost) across the board for retail sales, industrial output, and fixed investment, the country's GDP came well above expectations of 4.50%, printing at a 4.90% increase YoY.

This was good news for a world starved for any positive developments out of China, and Chinese assets promptly bounced (if only to sink shortly after as attention return to China's rapidly disintegrating property sector). There is just one problem: as with every economic data coming out of China (and lately the US, as well), this was a lie.

While it is true that reported real GDP was 4.9%, what SocGen's Albert Edwards points out in his latest Global Strategy Weekly note is that this was only possible because the Chinese economy remained in deflation in Q3, hardly an indication of economic prosperity.

As Edwards explains, the 4.9% upside surprise on real GDP was "only achieved because of the surprisingly sharp 1.4% fall in the GDP deflator – that was then added to weak 3.5% nominal GDP growth."

This is a problem because as the SocGen strategist observes next, "nominal GDP growth in China at 3.5% (red line in chart below) is far lower than the (more…)

The Conference Board's Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) continued its decline in September, dropping 0.7% MoM (worse than the 0.4% decline expected).

• The biggest positive contributor to the leading index was jobless claims at +0.13

• The biggest negative contributor was average consumer expectations at -0.19

This is the 18th straight monthly decline in the LEI (and 18th month of 19) –  the longest streak of declines since 'Lehman' (22 straight months (more…)