I stopped updating my economic data banks after Covid, partly because everything depended on the progress of the virus and discovering vaccines, and economic data and the economic cycle didn't matter; and partly because I got very depressed, some of which was due to Covid and the fault lines it exposed in our society. Of course, when I did start to update my data banks, it was no longer a matter of adding the latest observations --- I had to catch up and fill the gaps between 2020 and now. And, there were the inevitable revisions, which required data going further back than just 3 years. Although I do use the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis's wonderful data base ("FRED"), I also need to do lots of manual updates.
I'm almost done. And I'll be producing a slew of new charts and analysis over the next few days, covering world industrial production, and GDP, world inflation, world unemployment, as well as my leading indices for Australia and China.
To whet your appetite, here's a chart of the BIG8 inflation rate compared with the percentage of countries world wide where inflation is above 6%. It's still only partial data, I haven't quite finished updating CPIs for the 40 plus countries I monitor, but it is revealing. Yes, inflation has peaked --- but it's far from being a solved problem, visible only in the rearview mirror. More on this in a later post.
As usual, you'll be able to see a clearer picture if you click on the graph.
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