My email inbox was hit with the following advertisement from The Australia Institute promoting a new book imploring Australia to copy the Nordic nations on policy: The Australia Institute’s Nordic Policy Centre is delighted to announce a new book The Nordic Edge: Policy Possibilities for Australia, edited by Andrew Scott and Rod Campbell, published by
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TSLombard with the note: The chip shortage is adding to inflationary pressure and turbocharging the recovery of EastAsian exporters. Although a secular demand shift is under way–embedding semiconductors into the price of a much wider array of goods and services–integrated circuit capex and prices are still highly cyclical. The boom will be followed by disinflationary
See our Coronavirus data Dashboard for individual country data. COVID-19 statistics and cases around the World Europe Americas Asia Vaccination & Cases More COVID-19 Statistics and Analysis See our latest blog posts or podcasts here. See our Coronavirus data Dashboard for individual country data Data sources This is a list
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This is what happens when you have a competent vaccine rollout. No prison island. No budget bribes to offset it. Just folks getting on planes and traveling their butts off: At the current rate of rebound, the US will exceed 2019 travel volumes by August this year: What follows is a boom. And when I
Deutsche with the note on why elevated US activity and inflation are not over yet: Sorry, we’re out of stock So far, share markets have been relatively calm about supply chain problems. This could signal investor complacency given that reports of supply chain shortages and price jumps have been hard to avoid. One of the
Despite the resurgent virus in developing economies, developed countries are making solid vaccine strides, via Goldman: Vaccinations outperformed our forecasts across all DMs in April apart from theUS. Supply will accelerate further in May, largely thanks to Pfizer-BioNTech, but also increasing capacity from other producers, and Novavax approval in the UK. The daily pace of
Goldman with the note: Our global GS Effective Lockdown Index (ELI) – a combination of official restrictions and actual mobility data from 46 economies, weighted by PPP GDP –remained broadly unchanged in the last week of April as ELI tightening in the eAsia Pacific (ex-China) region was offset by ELI easing in other regions. Using
As we know, Australia’s household saving rate boomed last calendar year on the back of lockdowns (which reduced expenditure) and massive stimulus (which increased disposable income). An enormous $187 billion of household income was saved in calendar year 2020 – more than double the previous peak of $80.5 billion saved by households in 2015: Turns
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Nordea with the note: A crack-up boom, or business as usual? At the beginning of this year a friend said “he was afraid to hold cash”. Looking at asset price inflation since then it appears he was right to be fearful. House prices have been exploding higher, key equity indices trade at all time highs, metal
The tech heavy NASDAQ is up nearly 58% in the last twelve months, leading the way against other stock markets – all of which are enjoying bull market conditions with 20-30% annual gains. But is the top coming from an unlikely source? Apple posted its latest quarterly earnings overnight that had two big surpsies –
A new research paper from the Ronzetti Initiative for the Study of Labor Markets predicts that working from home (WFH) will stick after the pandemic ends, with 20% of full workdays to be performed remotely long-term versus 5% previously. It also estimates a 5% productivity uplift from WFH: We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple
Morgan Stanley are out with a vague “Sell in May, but don’t go away” research note, implying a “difficult summer” (read: our winter) ahead for markets as they get complacent due to a mild form of normality returning to developed economies post COVID. They contend there are three fundamental challenges to the “everything is awesome”
Bank of America has published an interesting chart on the rising COVID vaccination rates across the USA and UK, where around 70% of their populations have received at least one shot: The US administered 21mn vaccine doses over the past week, increasing the total to 218.9mn. Europe administered 21mn doses this past week, for a
A new study from the United States has found that the rise of remote work following the pandemic will boost productivity by 5% by eliminating wasteful commutes and spurring the use of new technologies: The paper was co-authored by Jose Maria Barrero of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and
Even before COVID, China was facing stiff headwinds from an ageing population. These headwinds stem from the nation’s ‘one child policy’, which came into effect in the early-1970s and was credited with preventing around 400 million births from 1979 to 2010. The ‘one child policy’ initially produced a population pyramid that was optimal to economic growth,
Over the past year we have witnessed China ban a range of imports from Australia, in contravention of the free-trade agreement (ChAFTA) that the two nations signed in 2015. Just last week, China slapped enormous duties – ranging from 116% to 218% – on wine from Australia for the next five years, in turn depriving
Morgan Stanley on the amphetamine business cycle: A year ago this week, global equities bottomed as jobless claims spiked to all-time highs with the shutdown of the global economy as a result of the pandemic, and gloom started to set in. It was also around this time that massive monetary and fiscal policy intervention began,
Crikey these markets are radical. Readers will know that I have been on the case of the new “taper tantrum” for many months. But the last few days have seen it come off bigly as oil has corrected heavily. So, where are we now with yields and wider asset prices in what we have come
Cross-posted from Policy Tensor comes a narrative that will send a shiver down the spine of the Aussie fake left: As I watched Powell give his speech yesterday, I had to keep pinching myself to check that I wasn’t dreaming. The technocrats who’ve run the world economy since the Volcker Coup finally seemed to get it.
For the past thirty years, markets and economies have enjoyed what has become known as the Great Moderation. This was a period of declining inflation and therefore business cycle volatility. Many reasons are have been proferred for the evolution of these longer and less volatile business cycles. Some see it as the triumph of the
For a few months now I have posited a global economic circumstance called “Biden’s America First”. It is one in which the US fiscal and vaccine advantages materially outstrip Europe leading to higher growth, inflation and yields. In turn this will be deflationary for the world as the US dollar comes to dominate again. Goldman
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Yesterday I noted that the latest research on vaccine efficacy coming out of the UK is very encouraging. The vaccines are working better than expected from lab tests and once fully immunised even virus variants are heavily retarded. Today Nordea looks at the timetablele for rollout and reopening: Key takeaways from the analysis 35-37% of
Key points from the UK’s COVID Symptom Study: No vaccines contain COVID-19. Pfizer better than AZ in infection risk reduction after one shot but both good: 90% reduction in hospitalisations. “Definite immunity” still a work in progress. Variants are “clobbered” by the second dose of vaccines. South African version definitely and probably Brazilian. Single-dose still
Mizuho with the warning: We have made it a habit, early every Monday morning, to review the global status of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on figures listed on the Johns HopkinsUniversity web site. We want to know whether rise in new infections is accelerating or slowing down. We are particularly interested in whether any specific
Natural selection is a beast. The moment we get individual or herd immunity and natural selection goes to work on finding a way around it. The FT is reporting on a new COVID variant from Brazil that is spooking medicos: First detected in November it has now spread to 35 countries. 25-61% of previously infected
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