ECONOMICS

China’s manufacturing activity in April saw its worst contraction since December 2023, exposing sharp signs of weakness in Asia’s biggest economy from the trade war with the US, and boosting calls for fresh Chinese stimulus, which is always "just around the corner" but never arrives.

In the aftermath of significantly higher US tariffs, China's official NBS manufacturing PMI fell to 49.0 in April from 50.5 in March, much lower than consensus expectations, the lowest (more…)

There were good and bad news in today's GDP report.

Starting with the bad news, Q1 GDP printed -0.3%, worse than the -0.2% expected and the first negative print since Q1 2022 when the economy was in a recession but was subsequently revised out of it

The good news is that the drop was actually supposed to be much worse (recall the Atlanta Fed's latest GDP estimate was -2.7%, or -1.5% excluding record gold imports). Indeed, if one looks at the components of today's (more…)

One month after the BLS reported that in February the labor market reverted to its deteriorating trendline, when the US had 7.568 million job openings (missing estimates of 7.655 million), a drop from the 7.762 million in January (revised from 7.740 million), and down 877,000 from the prior year, moments ago the latest JOLTS report showed that in March the labor market continued to deteriorate, and the number of job openings declined again, this time by 288K, from a downward revised 7.480MM (more…)