Bitcoin was first introduced in a 2009 white paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Since then, cryptocurrencies, also known as virtual or digital currencies, have.
May 03, 2021
One of the key measures business leaders have been eyeing closely to gauge the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic has been capital expenditures (capex), which took a huge hit in the first two quarters of 2020. The good news is that capex has been enjoying a boom, even outpacing the rebound in consumer spending.
“I think capex was one of the surprising areas of resilience in the last quarter of 2020, and the latest indicators point to solid capex growth right through the first quarter as well,” says Joe Lupton, economist at JPMorgan Chase in New York.
Lupton says that while consumer-goods spending slumped in November and December due to the second wave in US infections over Thanksgiving and Christmas, capex spending actually expanded at about 1.5% a month in the same period. The rest of the world has been slower to recover than the US economy, but there are signs that capex is ramping up elsewhere as well.
Yves here. This article provides an interesting counterargument to the widespread belief that Covid-related stimulus will generate inflation. Aside from the fact that the economy was below capacity before the Covid crisis (supported by the high level of involuntary part-time employment) and therefore its ability to support more demand is likely high than deficit hawks would have you believe, the lack of labor bargaining power will seriously dampen any one-shot spending from producing sustained wage gains. And remember, in an services-dominant economy, labor costs are the single biggest cost category.
And I am very fond of this sort of analysis. Ken Rogoff’s and Carmen Reinhardt’s study of 800 years of financial crises produced the important finding that high levels of international capital flows are strongly correlated with financial blowups.