Blaming the weather has become such a popular strategy for explaining away poor economic data that calling attention to the PhDs and Wall Street analysts who employ it in a desperate attempt to perpetuate the US economic recovery myth has almost lost its comedic value… almost.
But not quite.
Which is why we found it particularly amusing that the NY Fed — and this is the same NY Fed that recently called [3] the San Francisco Fed’s Steve Liesman-assisted residual seasonality coup a “myth” — admits [4] that “real consumption expenditures have yet to show signs of a significant pickup from a slowdown in winter.” “Growth has been tepid,” the NY Fed research team notes, “despite better weather.”
So our only question is this: with winter and all the cold weather, snow, and ice that economists are always shocked to see accompanying it just five months away, how is it possible that the Fed will be able to start raising rates in December?
Or, summarized...
[5]
