11 September 2001

China to ask WTO for sanctions on US in trade dispute: Reuters
Former PBOC gov: US tariffs bringing Russia and China closer: CNBC
US Southeast coast braces for Hurricane Florence: CNN
Trump adviser threatens Syria if chemical weapons used: Time
World hunger rises as climate change curbs access to food: Bloomberg
N. Korea’s Kim asks Trump for a second summit: BBC
Many Americans still struggling a decade after financial crisis: LA Times
Are junk bonds a “new safe haven” for investors? MarketWatch
US consumer credit rose at 5.1% annual rate in July: MarketWatch

Selling weighed on all the main categories of global markets last week, based on a set of exchange-traded products. The biggest slide: stocks in emerging markets.
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Russian and Syrian jets resumed air strikes in Idlib: Reuters
Hurricane threatens Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states on US East Coast: WaPo
China’s warily monitoring a modest pickup in inflation: NY Times
Trade war is lifting global holdings of China’s currency: SCMP
Sweden: far-right, anti-immigrant party becomes 3rd-largest party: Fox
Fed’s Rosengren sees two more rate hikes in 2018: Bloomberg
US wage growth is accelerating: USA Today
Changes in credit supply are a crucial driver of economic cycles: Barron’s
There’s still a bullish case for the economy and the stock market: Scott Grannis

● Blaming China: It Might Feel Good but It Won’t Fix America’s Economy
By Benjamin Shobert
Excerpt via International Policy Digest
Given how Donald Trump has spoken about China, it would seem Americans wish China had stayed poor, isolated and powerless. To elites in DC during the run up to the last election, this was all noise; but to politically disenfranchised and economically dislocated Americans, blaming China for our economic problems was embraced as truth. As the American economy has struggled to create wins for more than the wealthiest, politicians have become increasingly willing to point towards China as the cause. Now trade is perceived to be a zero-sum game, where China’s win is America’s loss. This leads to an important question: is America’s frustration with China nothing more than a distraction from profound insecurities we have about our economy, global status and domestic politics?
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Private payrolls in the US increased by a seasonally adjusted 204,000 in August, marking a sharply stronger gain over the previous month’s revised 153,000 advance, the Labor Department reports. Meantime, the year-over-over trend held steady at a 1.9% pace for the sixth month in a row. Today’s numbers reaffirm that the labor market continues to expand at a healthy rate, a sign that the nine-year-old economic expansion is in no immediate danger and so further monetary policy tightening has a green light to continue.
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The hard data on inflation points to a modestly accelerating rate of inflation, a trend that supports the Federal Reserve’s ongoing policy of gently but consistently raising interest rates. The main push-back to that narrative is the Treasury market.
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US payrolls expected to rebound in today’s Labor Dept report: MarketWatch
Global output slipped to five-month low in August: IHS Markit
ISM Non-Mfg Index for US reflects stronger growth in August: CNBC
US services sector growth eased to four-month low in August: IHS Markit
Jobless claims fell last week, near a 49-year low: Reuters
Job cuts in August rose to third highest this year: Challenger, Gray & Christmas
Productivity in US up at an unrevised 2.9% annualized rate in Q2: Reuters
US private employment growth eased to 10-month low in August: ADP

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that “investors poured almost $1 billion into Fidelity Investments’ two zero-fee index funds in their first month of operation.” As new fund launches go, this one looks like a win-win for all sides — for Fidelity as well as investors. It’s too early to say for sure how this plays out in the financial industry, but the early signs suggest we haven’t seen the last of the freemium model in asset management. For some perspective, take a look at a story I wrote for RIABiz.com, which was published a few days ago here.

Year-to-date returns for US equity investing are still dominated by small-cap and growth factors, based on a set of exchange-traded funds (ETFs).  By contrast, large-cap-value stocks are currently posting the weakest gain so far in 2018 among the main equity factor buckets.
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