Federal Reserve Rate Hike Still In Play For December

The recently slower pace of jobs creation likely takes an interest rate hike off the table when Federal policymakers met in October but a move is still in play for December.

In August and September payroll gains averaged only 139,000 but that likely had much to do with a recent surge in worker productivity. Jobs gains have softened several times during the recovery only to rebound, and the long term prospects for economic growth remain strong.

Consumer activity appears quite robust. Third quarter spending will likely register a 3 to 4 percent annual gain, and household balance sheets are in their best shape since the recovery began.

Hampering growth are the stronger dollar, which makes exports and import-competing industries less competitive, and fears the Chinese government will further mismanage the world’s second largest economy.

For years, Chinese growth was juiced by a combination of mercurial protectionism and fraud. Chinese manufacturing and exports were advanced far more than its lower labor costs warranted through a cheap currency—made possible by a combination of Peoples Bank of China printing yuan to buy dollars and pervasive limits on inward foreign investment and capital flows. And an endless flow of bank loans, supported by dishonest bookkeeping, that permitted many Chinese companies to keep exporting even as they piled up losses.

Similarly, irresponsible lending to builders and stock investors created menacing bubbles in property and equity markets, and have rendered large state-owned banks effectively insolvent.

Those policies created steroidal growth for countries shoveling coal, copper and other commodities to supply China’s factories and builders but now that Beijing’s effervesces has gone flat, important economies like Brazil, Australia and Indonesia face difficult adjustments and perhaps long recessions.

Still, it is important to recognize that while virtually all nations’ exports to China are slowing, its exports on steroids for two decades slowed growth for the United States and much of the EU by flooding stores with artificially cheap goods and shuttering many of their factories.