This week’s 4 must-see charts
The gaping chasm between Mark Carney’s messaging and market expectations of future rate hikes, suspicious Chinese statistics, the sudden devaluation of Kazakhstan's tenge, and Janet Yellen's labour market worries.
We bring you some of our favourite analyst’s picks of the most important graphs this week, as well as a choice of our own.
Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First
Following the latest Inflation Report, expectations about when the Bank of England will pull the pin on rate hikes have once again shifted, despite Mark Carney’s protestations, with short sterling contracts yesterday hinting that rates will be one per cent in March 2015, two per cent in June 2016 and 2.5 per cent by Christmas 2016.
“Fluffy” forward guidance will not stop traders betting that the base rate is set to fly higher over the next two years.
Darren Gibbs, chief economist (New Zealand) at Deutsche Bank
There has long been a suspicion that Chinese firms are using trade invoicing to cover what are really speculative capital flows, or faking values to receive extra export tax credits.
This graph shows that measured in US dollars there has been at times very large differences between what China claims to be exporting to Hong Kong and what Hong Kong measures as being exported from China.
This difference was again large in December 2013. We don't have the Hong Kong data for January yet but the China exports series has corrected down sharply in January, very probably closing the gap with the more stable Hong Kong data.
Lars Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank
Catching up (or rather down) with the Joneses – the devaluation of the Kazakh tenge.
Seen elsewhere
Janet Yellen’s inaugural Congressional testimony took place against the backdrop of a continued fall in the unemployment rate. But, as Capital Economics’s Paul Ashworth points out, it’s not all good news – Yellen stressed the importance of looking beyond the headline unemployment numbers.
And as the graph above shows, increasing amounts of Americans are working part-time for economic reasons (because they have no other options). A continuation of this trend would paint a considerably less rosy picture of the US labour market.