Why wouldn’t it be?
Apparently, the European Central Bank (ECB) balance sheet was meant to shrink significantly in 2019. It has shrunk just 0.5% in 2019 until July 5th (as against 5% for the Federal Reserve in the same period).
At 4.67 trillion Euros (or around 41% of Euro area or Eurozone GDP), it doesn’t look like things are going to change quickly.
Here are global central bank interest rates for each country in a table (in increasing order of interest rate in % on July 1, 2019),
Continue reading “Interest Rates for each country and change over the past year – July 2019 Edition”
Money supply is simply the total amount of money in circulation in a country. For the U.S. there are several components of the money supply: M1, M2, and MZM (M3 is no longer tracked by the Federal Reserve); these components are arranged on a spectrum of narrowest to broadest.
Continue reading “Money supply growth for the U.S. has slowed and it isn’t a good sign”
The seasonally adjusted current account of the balance of payments for the European Union was a surplus of €40.5billion or 1% of GDP in the first quarter (Q1) of 2019, up from a surplus of €40.2billion or 1.0% of GDP in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2018 and down from a surplus of €58.3billion or 1.5% of GDP in the first quarter (Q1) of 2018, according to estimates released by Eurostat.
The United Kingdom’s trade deficit more than doubled to a record £20.3 billion in the first quarter (Q1) of 2019, or 3.7% of GDP. This was the fifth consecutive quarter of deterioration.
The last time the UK’s trade deficit was over 3% of GDP was in Q2 2002.
Continue reading “UK’s trade deficit hit a record in Q1 2019 due to Brexit stockpiling”
Australia’s Central Bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cut its benchmark cash rate by 25 basis points to an all-time low of 1%. This following a cut of 25 basis points in June. This is the first time since 2012 that the RBA has delivered back-to-back interest rate cuts.
Continue reading “Australia’s Central Bank cuts interest rates again to an all-time low of 1%”
Strong or weak economy? We look at
Continue reading “Four consumer indicators of the current state of the U.S. economy”
U.S. Equities Soar
June 2019 saw U.S. equity market records being broken shattered.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) gained 7% in June, its biggest June gain in 9 decades or its best June since 1938.
The S&P 500 jumped 6.9%, its best June performance in 7 decades or its best June since 1955. The S&P 500 is up 17% in 2019 so far, the best start to a year since 1997.
After a very quiet few weeks, we will restart normal service beginning July 1. We promise to again bring you a completely refreshing perspective on everything finance, markets and banking. This time it is different.
(Apologies for the delay in this being published, it should have been published almost a month ago.)
May 2019 was the quietest month (till date) for us due to unprecedented reasons. We had hoped April 2019 will be the quietest month but turns out this time it was (again) different. Hoping to write more going forward starting July but don’t want to promise that.
Continue reading “Highlights from May 2019 – Hot or cool global economy?”