{"id":10317,"date":"2015-07-23T05:43:13","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T10:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10317"},"modified":"2015-07-23T05:43:13","modified_gmt":"2015-07-23T10:43:13","slug":"world-trade-drops-most-since-financial-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10317","title":{"rendered":"World Trade Drops Most Since Financial Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

World Trade Drops Most Since Financial Crisis<\/a><\/h3>\n

Maybe we shouldn\u2019t take our daily corporate samples too seriously. Maybe they don\u2019t adequately represent the global economy. So IBM\u2019s revenues last quarter plunged 13% from a year ago. It blamed China and the dollar, among other culprits. But IBM\u2019s revenues have dropped for 13 quarters in a row. It\u2019s a normal IBM condition and not a reflection of the global economy.<\/p>\n

A whole slew of other tech companies chimed in with either disappointing revenues or disappointing outlooks, or both, each blaming a variety of issues, among them China and the dollar. Chip maker Qualcomm just reported a 14% plunge in its quarterly revenues. It\u2019s having trouble in the smartphone market and will lay off a bunch of people. But maybe they\u2019re just running into tougher competitors, rather than a lousy\u00a0global economy. And the PC business, which is cratering, is dragging down all those involved. That\u2019s structural and has little to do with the state of the global economy.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s industrial giant United Technology which reported that its revenues last quarter dropped 5%. Today Caterpillar reported that global machine sales plunged 15% in June compared to a year ago, after having dropped 12% in May and 11% in April, In Asia, machine sales plunged 19%, in Latin America 50%. And in booming North America? Down 5%, after having been up for the prior two months.<\/p>\n

So CAT is\u00a0facing Japanese, Chinese, and German competitors. It\u2019s having to slug it out with them in China precisely when China is slowing. So it may be just CAT that\u2019s having a hard time.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t look at energy. Energy is getting clobbered\u2026.<\/p>\n

So maybe we\u2019re cherry-picking negative data. There are companies with actual revenue increases and positive outlooks, like Equifax, the credit bureau, which just reported a 10% jump in revenues (14% \u201cin local currency,\u201d as it says). Consumer borrowing is king, and Equifax expedites the process.<\/p>\n

So what the heck is going on?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

World Trade Drops Most Since Financial Crisis Maybe we shouldn\u2019t take our daily corporate samples too seriously. Maybe they don\u2019t adequately represent the global economy. So IBM\u2019s revenues last quarter plunged 13% from a year ago. It blamed China and the dollar, among other culprits. But IBM\u2019s revenues have dropped for 13 quarters in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5939,130,263,312,7483,3761,4170,7484,4254,4255],"class_list":["post-10317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-caterpillar","tag-china","tag-energy","tag-financial-crisis","tag-global-slowdown","tag-global-trade","tag-ibm","tag-trade-momentum","tag-wolf-richter","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10318,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10317\/revisions\/10318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}