Growth

This monitor is a reflection of how we update our assessments of economic growth in real-time as we get meaningful updates from macroeconomic data releases. If you feel like you're getting too many data updates, you can adjust your email preferences here. We intend on providing regular updates

Retail sales showed strength in January. As a proxy for gross labor income trends, it confirms both (1) the resilience we're seeing in the labor market and (2) the amplified role of residual seasonality (December understates growth, January overstates/rebounds). Real-time data-watching was already complicated enough due to

The Fed is arguing that inflation is driven by the cost-push impacts of wage growth on service prices. This is a traditional view, but the pandemic recovery has been anything but textbook. In our view, the primary nexus is a demand-pull relationship. The core question for the Fed ought to

Is productivity worryingly low right now? Some commentators have argued it is, going on to argue that the "disappointing" productivity data should be a primary factor in the Fed's upcoming policy decisions. By their logic, disappointing realized productivity performance in 2022 increases the likelihood of further

Two things are all but guaranteed for the rest of the week: 1. The Fed is going to hike 75 basis points (2.25%-2.50%) and signal that it remains vigilant about inflation. Their characterization of growth dynamics are likely to remain on the rosier side, and inflation expectations

In this first piece of a series, we’re going to walk through an overview of the ways inflation statistics can diverge between countries and demonstrate just how difficult it is to establish apples-to-apples comparisons between aggregate inflation measures in different countries.

Tightening global financial conditions may serve to reinforce policy tightening, and the Fed should be cognizant of the risk that hikes may have a stronger-than-expected impact in this period of elevated uncertainty.