No Economy is an Island: A More Rigorous Look Under the Hood of the U.S. Economy
Is it possible, in a global economy in which the United States’ principal competitors are experiencing slow growth, disinflation or deflation, wage stagnation or slowing of wage growth, and slumping currencies relative to the US$, that the U.S. economy can be an island of relative prosperity unto itself?
Can the level of global market interest rates, in the aggregate at historically low levels (some short term rates being, in fact, negative) be ignored? Or is something more serious amiss?
Is the U.S. economy, so heavily dependent on consumption and exhibiting similar characteristics as its competitors (disinflation and anemic growth/reversals in many data points), really as healthy as equity markets seem to believe it is?
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The attached slide deck explains what is really going on under the hood of what appears to many to be a U.S. economy moving out of idle and into sustainable traction forward. Included in these 25 data-packed slides is research and analysis illustrating, numerous factors such as U.S. monetary policy, downward pressure on long U.S. Treasury bond rates, Disinflationary trends, etc.
Daniel Alpert
Managing Partner
Westwood Capital, LLC and affiliates
Office: +1-212-953-6448
www.westwoodcapital.com
What? This guy wants to evaluate unemployment based on the actual value of the jobs, rather than the current “official” U3 “1 hour per week = 40 hours per week” approach? Why can’t he be satisfied with the simple “1=40” formulation that makes everybody happy? Whiner.
Re household debt: The statistics do exist to analyze more completely, and show that household debt / income as of 2011 (last year available) was 25% higher than in 2002. For the lowest income quintile, debt / income was up about 70%. Since 2011, proxies show that household debt / income has dropped by about 5 percentage points.
Wouldn’t that merely be Jobs X Wages?
Doesn’t matter which you consume first. In tandem, the Alpert MiB podcast+ Slide show offers a super interesting assessment of the global economy. Try the latest Hoisington quarterly for the full trifecta on this line of thinking.
A discussion of our economy is a backdrop to our Markets direction. Our Markets are bifurcated. Crystal balling ….. I decided not to complete this post… as there are always facts to point a direction…
Listening to someone who has a different Matrix of direction than I…. might challenge my integrity to my own holdings and that has been a failure, to me, more than than an enlightenment. Today and tomorrow is all that matters we should all be equipped to change our own directions…. all opinions, with all due respect have been watered down… and if the sky is falling, I don’t need someone to tell me -“Maybe” doesn’t always mean will be.
PS. the writer’s credentials mean something on the upper east side