Sunday, November 5, 2023

Big 8 PMI continues to drift lower

 ... even though the US appears to be troughing.

The chart shows manufacturing PMI.  My "Big 8" represents the GDP-weighted average of extreme-adjusted PMIs for the US, UK, Euro zone, Russia, Brazil, India, China and Japan.  The JP Morgan world PMI would most likely also use GDP-weighted PMIs for all the countries for which these surveys are available, but without first extreme-adjusting the time series.




The chart below shows the PMIs for the 26 biggest economies, and comes from S&P Global's report on JP Morgan's October PMI.  India and Russia are strong, Mexico is following the US up.  Meanwhile, Europe is very weak and Asia (apart from Indonesia) is soggy.  The outstanding performance of the US economy despite the swingeing rise in interest rates and the collapse in money supply as a result of the Fed's "quantitative tightening" (QT?)  is due to Federal government spending.   There has been no similar fiscal stimulus in Europe, except, obviously, in Russia.  The nature of fiscal stimulus is that it is quick-acting (whereas monetary policy takes months to bite), but equally, if it's not continually increased, its effect is also quick to disappear.  So the effect of the US's fiscal stimulus may start to wane soon.  Who knows, given the chaotic US political situation?




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