It's out! The @EU_Commission winter economic forecast for 2021 📊
🇪🇸 +5.6% GDP
🇫🇷 +5.5% GDP
🇭🇷 +5.6% GDP
🇸🇮 +4.7% GDP
🇲🇹 +4.5% GDP
🇵🇹 +4.1% GDP
🇸🇰 +4.0% GDP
🇭🇺 +4.0% GDP
🇧🇪 +3.9% GDP
🇷🇴 +3.8% GDP
💶 +3.8% GDP
🇪🇺 +3.7% GDP
🇬🇷 +3.5% GDP
🇱🇻 +3.5% GDP
🇮🇪 +3.4% GDP
🇮🇹 +3.2% GDP

Diminishing Marginal Returns

The productivity of our debt is collapsing and that is creating a major problem.

The problem is here now, and not in the future.

Here is why:

1)

Charted below is the increase in total debt and the increase in nominal GDP in the 8 quarters before each of the last six recessions.

In other words, how much did debt increase, and how much did GDP increase in the final two years of each economic expansion?

2)

As the chart shows, it is taking a larger amount of debt to increase GDP.

3)

Graphed another way, leading up to the 1980 recession it took about 1.94 dollars of debt to boost GDP by 1 dollar.

Leading up to the COVID recession saw debt increase nearly 6 dollars for each 1 dollar of GDP growth.

4)

Flipping the ratio shows the decline in the utility of debt.

We are only generating about 15-20 cents of growth for each dollar of debt.

This becomes a larger problem when we think about "growth rates" instead of nominal dollars.

5)

has anyone covering the Wall Street GME reaping and sowing gone into the fact that a lot of the GameStop and directly associated trades have been largely amplified by social listening powered mega firms doing machine learning automated trades because the “idea” of GME is popular?

like I thought this was a thing investor people & press just knew & instead it’s all just focused on the message of redditors clowning short sellers and not “the computers saw the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters and decided That Would Be A Cool Thing To Emulate” for $$$

for those new: finance social listening is a marketing “science” that involves advanced web & social network data collectors scraping everything for nuance on companies, purchasing behavior & language, investor & finance sentiment, etc & using it to make billions of trades for $$

Musk & his core investor clique is notorious for doing this as are some other big hedge firms & finance firms - you take the raw off Bloomberg Terminal, Superdata, public social networks and headlines etc etc, machine learning the fuck out of it, collect money. A hype machine.

This has been going on for about 8 years but only got popular & competitive in the past 2, when firms realized the machines could do a better job with these data flows in setting up short term shorts & holds vs people - & they could also “game” media to effect other hype machines

A thread on an interesting report by Goldman Sachs' Peter Oppenheimer, the bank's chief global equity strategist. He points out that Goldman's "Bear Market Risk Indicator" is looking ominous.

There are three factors that suggest that the recent stability could evaporate and that equities are "about to enter a sustained bear market", Oppenheimer says.

First is the fact that growth, inflation and interest rate outlook is unfriendly for equities.

Second is that greater volatility, such as multiple corrections and new peaks (which we've seen in 2018) tend to presage a full bear market.

Here is Goldman's data showing how falls and bounces tend to come ahead of "the dramatic final fall".

🚨🇬🇧🇪🇺💄👠👗💅🏻🕺💃🇪🇺🇬🇧🚨
UK’s £35bn fashion industry warns of “decimation” from #brexit - big names sign open letter to @BorisJohnson urging action. Many of 50,000 SMEs on the rack due to VAT, customs and work permit issues. Stay with me/1


You can read the full text of the letter here, co-ordinated by Fashion Round Table @FashionRoundTab, but tl;dr it says that #Brexit has left a "gaping hole" in an industry that relies of free movement of professionals. It's a familiar cry /2



@FashionRoundTab The industry, already whacked by #COVID19, is now discovering that cross-border sales are a horror (VAT, Customs, long delays) and models, stylists, photographers that used to blat around Europe can't any more. They need permits, for themselves, for their gear /3

It is on one level amazing that this is only just fully dawning - as the musician industry found out recently - but fashion is not just big names and big companies. It's actually a mountain of small companies and sole traders often that feed into a huge (£35bn) industry /4

I've written about fashion models issue before (they need tier-5 sponsorship visas) and how that will erode London's status as a hub, but this goes so much wider than this - hence the #dontmakefashionhistory campaign - and comes down the lack of a mobility chapter in the deal /5