China, Gold and Reserve Currencies

In case you missed it, gold looks to be declining again (USD per troy ounce):

But let’s keep some perspective:

Assessing July

I’m back from my usual Ramadhan blogging break, and my, aren’t there lots of things to comment on. This will be a kind of omnibus blog post, covering some of the developments over the past month.

2Q2015 GDP Growth

A funny thing happened with the change in national accounts base year to 2010 – the economy all of a sudden got a lot harder to forecast. The usual indicators no longer seem to matter as much – for example, MIER’s confidence indices appear to have totally decoupled from GDP – which makes forecasting growth more than a little bit more difficult. IPI and trade remain good predictors, but their standard deviations have doubled and the forecasts are suggesting two completely different pictures of the economy.