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Global PMIs and Fed Policy: They’re Linked

Today a host of global purchasing managers indices (PMIs) reiterated that the global economy is slowing….quickly.

Within 24 hours, China, the US, and the euro area all reported July PMIs falling toward the feared 50 (below which the manufacturing industry is contracting) – 50.7, 50.9, and 50.4, respectively. The UK PMI fell below 50 to 49.1 in July.

I would posit (and I believe that others have, too, like Edward Hugh) that this is directly related to Fed policy, specifically that of quantitative easing (QE).

The chart above illustrates the stated PMIs alongside the dates of a shift in the Federal Reserve’s QE policy. The shorter bars indicate those dates when the Fed ended QE and announced that it would reinvest maturing proceeds. On the other hand, the full bars illustrate the outset of QE.

Falling PMIs correlate with the end of QE. New QE correlates with a rebound in global PMIs. Given this correlation and the latest GDP release, I expect that talk of QE anew to surface.

This post originally appeared at News N Economics and is reproduced here with permission.

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Edwin G. Dolan is an economist and educator with a Ph.D. from Yale University. Early in his career, he was a member of the economics faculty at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and George Mason University. From 1990 to 2001, he taught in Moscow, Russia, where he and his wife founded the American Institute of Business and Economics (AIBEc), an independent, not-for-profit MBA program. Since 2001, he has taught at several universities in Europe, including Central European University in Budapest, the University of Economics in Prague, and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, where he has an ongoing annual visiting appointment. During breaks in his teaching career, he worked in Washington, D.C. as an economist for the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and as a regulatory analyst for the Interstate Commerce Commission, and later served a stint in Almaty as an adviser to the National Bank of Kazakhstan. When not lecturing abroad, he makes his home in San Juan Islands, Washington.

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