Since 2012, I've been tracking approximately 500 economic datapoints each month, and constructing the world's best and most timely set of Shocks & Surprises indexes. Understanding these will give you a better understanding of how the world stands at any one time than any other single datapoint can possibly do. That's why they are followed by institutional asset managers around the world. I intend to show you the highlights of these on a regular basis. For today, here's the global shocks & surprises index, showing 4wk and 12m trends. In short, the world economy enters 2021 with a momentum which continues to surprise consensus and trend.
What happened today (5th Jan): Positive surprises from Eurozone money M3; German retail sales, Spanish consumer confidence, and the US ISM manufacturing index. And negative shocks from Japan's fiscal balance, and the ISM manufacturing prices paid index.
Keep watching for more updates.