Global Manufacturing Index Signals Rising Recession Risk

Despite a modest uptick in October, the JPM Global Manufacturing PMI just recorded its fourth straight reading below 50. With its 12-month moving average teetering on that dividing line between expansion and contraction, it seems clear that the risk is to the downside as far as the global economy is concerned.

In fairness, the index has only been around for 12 years, which is not enough of a history to establish a definitive causal relationship. But given the value that PMI indicators for individual countries have had with respect to predicting economic upturns and downturns, and it doesn't seem a stretch to interpret the recent negative readings in a similar light.

Comments

[roger]

For those misguided souls who believe that solving the financial mess, and promptly the good old days are back, yea....
Prosperity and abundance what caused it? turning the calendar back 200/300 years may give an answer, from the cotton mill to the mechanization of tools,to electricity,steam engine, combustion engine, steam ships, automobiles, modernization of farming etc....each and every new way of fabricating things promoted unlimited expansion of jobs, it was an explosion of scientific activity. Compare that to what is happening to day, the exact opposite is tacking place, technology now is eliminating human labor on a grand scale, with the latest marvel DROIDS taken over ALL production.
Can you smell the difference? do you really believe that Capitalism can survive WITHOUT
A PAYCHECK?

[The secret is out]

The Word - Supply Chained
Cheap prison labor leaves small manufacturers and unemployed Americans in the dust, but who else can make a toothbrush and a lunch tray into a crossbow?

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/419674/october-01-2012/the-word---supply-chained

[Dodd who?]

Federal Reserve Overstepped Bounds By Catering To Banks & Ignoring Congress

“Congress was clear about setting reasonable debit swipe fees and ensuring greater competition among card networks. It’s also clear that the Fed ignored Congress,” said Doug Kantor, an attorney for the merchants who have sued the Federal Reserve in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The fees charged to swipe both debit and credit cards for purchases total about $60 billion in revenues for banks and credit card companies, costing U.S. households hundreds of dollars a year. For merchants, swipe fees are the second highest cost for them, after labor. Swipe fees also have tripled since 2004, even while technology has lowered the cost of card transactions.

Part of the Dodd-Frank law included the Durbin Amendment, which sought to bring competition to debit card networks that process the transaction and to reduce the fees for using debit. The amendment instructed the Fed to set debit swipe fees that are “reasonable” and “proportional” to the banks’ costs. The Fed had determined the cost to be 4 cents a swipe.

After Durbin passed, the Fed dropped debit swipe fees from an average 42 cents a transaction (over 10 times actual cost) to 12 cents. The big banks, however, immediately leaned on the Fed, forcing their regulator to set the debit swipe fees at 21 cents, five times the banks’ actual cost, plus .05 percent of the transaction and an additional one cent for fraud prevention.

The banking lobbying convinced the Fed to cram the many costs of running a bank into an overinflated fee, rather than focusing on the banks’ cost of handling a debit transaction. The Fed also undercut Congress’ intent to make the debit card industry more competitive by not allowing merchants to choose among networks to process a sale.

http://www.unfaircreditcardfees.com/site/press/federal_reserve_overstepped_bounds_by_catering_to_banks_ignoring_congress

[The Secret Deal]

The Secret Deal Between the Democrats and Republicans To Control the Presidential Debates
"The only way to forestall the work of criticism (critical thought) is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice."

Northrop Frye

Would you be surprised to learn that secret deals between the two major US political parties and the major news media control access to the Presidential debates, thereby controlling the discussion, turning them into show pieces and beauty contests obsessed with the trivial and the technicalities of performance art, rather than substantive discussions of the issues?

Did you wonder why third party messages and non-corporately sponsored ideas are completely ignored in the discussions, debates, and for the most part in the 'free press?'

It appears that for at least once the Democrats and Republicans were able to agree on something. They agreed to monopolize access to the presidential debate, with the help of a compliant and greedy corporate media, in a way that would almost certainly violate the antitrust laws, assuming these politicians were subject to any laws but their own.

This is not a serious and original discussion of the issues. This is bread and circuses. Bread for the media and the politicians, and circuses for the people.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-secret-deal-between-democrats-and.html

[eugene]

I don't expect a serious discussion in the first place. In the depths of my cynical soul, I don't think a thing has changed since the first ship hit N or S American shores. The truth simply isn't in us.

[Pick Your Poison]

Chris Hedges on "US Elections Pick Your Poison"

http://youtu.be/k8yWToejbJg

[roger]

(I don't think a thing has changed since the first ship hit N or S American shores)
Surf the web. look at the commentary's, see any interest in the fundamentals?
not much has changed since the orgies of the roman arenas, trivia and sensationalism is
daily feed. Big bold headings followed by small print to tell the story, the impact is more important than the story. Even art prostitutes itself in order to attract the masses. Mediocrity should gravitate towards excellence, consumerism has turned the table, and now excellence tumbles down to vulgarity.

[pleonexia]

Feast of fools

How American democracy became the property of a commercial oligarchy.

Good intentions, like mother's milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of "the prosperous fool" - its members so besotted by their faith in money that "they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy".

The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country's equestrian classes, aka the 20 per cent of the population that holds 93 per cent of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas. Their anxious and spendthrift company bears the mark of oligarchy ridden with the disease diagnosed by the ancient Greeks as pleonexia, the appetite for more of everything - more McMansions, more defence contracts, more beachfront, more tax subsidy, more prosperous fools. Aristotle mentions a faction of especially reactionary oligarchs in ancient Athens who took a vow of selfishness not unlike the anti-tax pledge administered by Grover Norquist to Republican stalwarts in modern Washington: "I will be an enemy to the people and will devise all the harm against them which I can."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292675035811825.html