The Gold Standard  

The UK Central Bank – Bank of England – has a publication called Agents’ summary of business conditions – similar to the US Federal Reserve’s Beige Book. Somehow , I feel that it is better to read, view and the charts are nice and colourful. The July issue of the Agents’ summary of Business Conditions was released just this week. The cover page bullets tell the story. Check it out. But, these lines inside caught my attention. Mohamed-El-Erian talked of DDR – de-leveraging, de-globalization and re-regulation. De-globalization is happening for other reasons too and not just because of failures with specialisation at the sovereign level, with global imbalances and because of trade protectionism. Here are the sentences that caught my attention:

Over and above any impact of weak domestic demand, there had been further reports that firms were switching to domestic suppliers of components and finished goods. Most attributed this to sterling’s earlier depreciation. But for some, import substitution had been driven by a strategic push to minimise inventories — as shipping times were shorter for domestically sourced items. [More here]

Incidentally, when I saw this afternoon that the retail sales volume grew 1.2% in June in the UK, I was only reminded of this news-item: 

Britain’s supplier of official statistics conceded that since the financial crisis began in August 2007, it has overstated the volume of retail sales growth by 56 per cent. [More here].

Would love to know – with some authenticity and credibility – if the bugs have been fixed.