Over the past two days, Chinese exports exploded, US payrolls bested 300k, and China’s CPI recorded the hottest inflation in 5 years. Globally synchronized growth? It’s times like these where remembering how nothing goes in a straight line helps settle and ground interpretations. In thinking that way already, you are never surprised when there are good even perfect data reports on occasion the way policymakers are always surprised with “unexpected” bad ones. We are in a global upturn, after all.
The question, as always, is whether these things represent a meaningful shift. The inflation/boom scenario is one where the economy doesn’t just meander at low level positives but accelerates forcefully into an inarguable growth period – something we haven’t seen anywhere for more than a decade.
It might be tempting to view this recent positive report cluster in that way, but, again, we’ve seen these before. It’s not just one month that is required to suggest what everyone is looking for. These have been over the past few years rather easily explained by outliers (China exports), noise (payrolls), and statistical difficulties (China CPI). We will know things are truly picking up when the bad months are what become attention grabbing for their infrequency.
Each of these data points deserve individual examination, so I’ll leave the two China series for later. Taking US payrolls first, it was a nearly perfect report. That in itself tells us very little. These had been almost common in 2015 and early 2016. As I wrote in January 2016 for the December 2015 BLS estimates:
I think it entirely fitting, even useful in the long run, that December’s payroll report was yet another perfect month; the fourth of 2015 by my unofficial count. There was absolutely nothing wrong with any of the components, at least in the raw job count estimated by various statistical regressions and adjusted with imputations (wages, not so much). The problem with surging labor statistics becomes obvious in the context of everything not labor-calculation related. Does anyone really buy that the economy shifted so much higher, and in December of all months?
