Global six-month real narrow money growth fell sharply in August, based on data covering 90% of the aggregate followed here. September / October data should be awaited to assess whether this represents a genuine change of trend; if so, the suggestion is that the global economy will lose momentum in early 2015.

Six-month real narrow money growth picked up around end-2013 and remained solid through July, consistent with respectable economic expansion through end-2014, allowing for the usual half-year lead – see first chart. The August reading, however, was the lowest since May 2012, ahead of a significant slowdown in industrial output – see first chart.

The August fall in the global measure mainly reflected big declines in the US and China. Eurozone real money growth has firmed modestly, while Japanese weakness may be starting to reverse – second chart.

The focus now shifts to the global longer leading indicator monitored here, an August reading of which will be available on 8 October. This indicator typically leads the industrial cycle by 4-5 months and has yet to signal a peak in output expansion – third chart.

There is a reasonable chance that real money growth will rebound in September / October. US weekly data so far in September have partially reversed August weakness. Eurozone money trends may continue to strengthen in response to recent ECB policy easing. Lower energy costs should result in the six-month rate of change of global consumer prices falling temporarily, supporting real money growth. The six-month change in Japanese real money, meanwhile, should turn positive again in October as the April sales tax rise drops out of the calculation.

Eurozone money measures rose solidly again in August, suggesting improving economic prospects and initial success for the ECB’s June easing measures.

Broad money M3 rose by 1.0%, or 6.1% annualised, in July and August combined, while narrow money M1 surged by 1.9%, or 12.2% annualised.

Six-month growth of real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) narrow money M1 has risen from 1.6% (not annualised) in April to 2.6% in August, a solid pace by historical standards. Real M3 expansion has recovered from 0.1% to 1.2% over the same period, the latter reading being the highest since October 2012, ahead of an economic recovery in 2013 – see first chart.

The July-August M3 increase partly reflected a resumption of bank buying of government securities*, following the ECB’s June announcement of cheap fixed-rate funding via the TLTROs (targeted longer-term refinancing operations). M1 is driven by household and corporate demand for transactions money – the recent surge suggests rising spending intentions.

The ECB publishes a country breakdown of overnight deposits, comprising about 80% of Eurozone M1. The six-month rate of change of real deposits has strengthened in Spain and Italy, remained broadly stable at a solid level in France and Germany and weakened further in the Netherlands – second chart. These numbers can be volatile from month to month but narrow money growth appears to be on a higher trend across the periphery than in the core – third chart.

US six-month real narrow money growth was much higher than in the Eurozone at the start of 2014, signalling US economic and equity market outperformance. Current growth rates are similar, mainly reflecting a recent US slowdown.

*Bank purchases were €43 billion, seasonally adjusted, in July-August versus an M3 increase of €98 billion.

The August Inflation Report introduced a new reason for continuing to delay a rise in interest rates – the labour supply, it claimed, has been expanding faster than expected, explaining the recent puzzling combination of strong employment growth with weak wages, while implying still-significant economic slack.

This “theory” is viewed here as implausible, for two reasons. First, it is at odds with official labour force statistics, showing a rise of 0.9% in the three months to July from a year before, equal to the average annual growth rate since 2005. (The Bank's claim may have been influenced by a rise in annual growth to 1.7% in the three months to April, the most recent number when the Report was prepared; this partly reflected a favourable base effect and has since reversed.)

Secondly, a labour supply surge should have slowed the rate of decline of unemployment while helping employers to fill vacancies. The jobless rate, however, has fallen considerably faster over the last six months than during the previous half-year (1.0 versus 0.5 percentage points). The job openings rate (i.e. vacancies expressed as a percentage of filled and unfilled jobs), meanwhile, has continued to rise rapidly and is almost back to its pre-recession peak.

Weak earnings growth probably reflects two factors – problems with the official data and the normal lag between labour market quantities and wages. Surveys paint a stronger picture – the September Markit household finance index, for example, reports the joint-fastest rise in income from employment in its 68-month history. Interestingly, the latest MPC minutes refer to Bank research into the official data suggesting that workforce composition effects “have been pulling down on average wage growth, perhaps significantly”.

The first chart below shows average regular earnings growth and the job openings rate since 2001, when the current vacancies series begins. The relationship over this period suggests that earnings growth should already have risen substantially.

A longer look back, however, indicates that current developments are not so unusual. The second chart shows earnings growth and an earlier version of the job openings rate over 1970-90*. There were three large rises in the openings rate over this period. Earnings growth followed with a lag of between six and 12 quarters.

Returning to the recent past, the openings rate bottomed in 2009 but embarked on a sustained rise only in the second quarter of 2012. Based on the average nine-quarter lag following the three increases over 1970-90, this suggests an upswing in earnings growth starting in the third quarter of 2014.

The lack of movement of wage growth to date, therefore, is consistent with history but a significant pick-up is now likely. With the labour market continuing to tighten, moreover, the coming increase should be sustained into 2016, at least.

*Based on vacancies at Jobcentres.

The Bank of England will this week cease publication of the Bank Return – a weekly summary statement of its assets and liabilities. The Bank claims that it needs to hide its balance sheet in order to fulfil its responsibility for maintaining financial stability. No other major central bank shares this view. It will no longer be possible to monitor some of the Bank’s activities in a timely fashion.

The Bank Return is 170 years old. The requirement to publish a weekly statement was introduced by the 1844 Bank Charter Act in order to strengthen confidence in the currency by demonstrating that the note issue was backed by gold and other assets.

The Bank lobbied for this requirement to be removed following the 2008 Northern Rock debacle, when analysts used the Bank Return to estimate emergency lending to the failing institution. This request was implemented in the Banking Act 2009 but the Bank did not immediately cease publication, probably because it would have attracted criticism for doing so at a time when the banking system was still receiving large-scale official support.

To create cover for the desired course of action, the Bank asked former insider Ian Plenderleith to consider the future of the Bank Return as part of a review of its emergency liquidity assistance operations during the crisis. Reporting in 2012, Plenderleith duly recommended that the Bank should cease publication “in order to improve its ability to provide covert liquidity assistance in future”.

Ignoring the undesirable loss of transparency and accountability, why should liquidity assistance be more effective if covert? Markets usually know when an institution is receiving central bank support; withholding information on the scale of support creates unnecessary uncertainty. Confirmation of large-scale assistance, indeed, may have a stabilising effect by demonstrating a central bank’s commitment to fulfil its lender of last resort responsibilities.

No other major central bank shares the Bank’s view that transparency must be sacrificed in order to ensure financial stability. The central banks of the US, Eurozone, Japan, Canada and Australia, among others, continue to publish weekly* balance sheet statements, in most cases with more detail than the Bank Return. Other central banks provide monthly statements.

The Bank will replace the Bank Return with a new weekly report giving information on selected balance sheet items but no aggregate assets / liabilities figure. The full balance sheet will be published quarterly with a five quarter lag and annually with a three to four month lag in the Bank’s Annual Report. The Bank is under no obligation to maintain these arrangements; it could choose to lengthen the lags even further or suspend publication entirely.

The original aim of the Bank Return – to demonstrate responsible management of the Bank’s balance sheet – remains important today. Monetary stability rests on confidence in the Bank’s ability to meet its obligations without printing money unbacked by assets. Ceasing publication may encourage conspiracy theories that the Bank wishes to engage in risky lending or interfere in markets, or even that the Treasury plans to cancel the Bank’s gilt holdings. Reduced disclosure, in other words, may result in more, not less, destabilising speculation.

*Japan publishes every 10 days.

Previous posts extending back to 2009 suggested that the global economic recovery from the 2008-09 “great recession” would mirror the revival after the 1974-75 “first oil shock” downturn. Industrial output has indeed followed a similar path but is now starting to diverge – necessary if economic optimists are to be proved correct.

The 2008-09 and 1974-75 recessions were of similar depth and duration. They were preceded by money / credit booms spurred by financial deregulation and loose monetary policy, and were triggered partly by a real income squeeze caused by a commodities-driven inflation spike. Both involved major financial stress – worse in 2008-09, although the UK secondary banking crisis of 1973-75 necessitated a Bank of England bail-out – and ushered in a prolonged period of further monetary accommodation, characterised by negative real interest rates.

The first chart superimposes the path of industrial output in the 1970s / early 1980s on recent performance. The two series have been rescaled so that the pre-recession peak in output equals 100 and the recession troughs (May 1975 and February 2009) are aligned. (Recent performance is measured by the CPB global industrial output series, which begins in 1991; the earlier data refer to the OECD area, which dominated the global economy in the 1970s, with current emerging-world countries playing a minor role.)

The current upswing tracked the 1970s path closely until end-2011, when progress was temporarily derailed by a second Eurozone recession. Stronger 2013 growth coupled with weakness in the earlier cycle have since more than made up the shortfall, with output now 3% above the level implied by the 1970s / early 1980s path.

The post-1975 upswing peaked in February 1980 after 57 months. The corresponding point of the current upswing was November 2013. An initial fall in output in 1980 was followed by a recovery in 1981 before a longer decline to a low in December 1982, equivalent to September 2016 in current-cycle terms.

The post-1975 upswing was derailed by a second oil price shock in 1979 and a generalised tightening of monetary policies in response to high inflation. The oil price surge reflected a loss of Iranian supplies due to revolution. In an attempt to control inflation, the Carter Administration imposed credit controls in 1980 but abandoned the experiment after the economy tanked – this partly explains the 1980 fall in global industrial output and a subsequent temporary recovery after controls were removed. US interest rates then spiked higher, contributing to the second, longer leg of the downturn.

The current upswing has not yet been subject to comparable shocks. There are, however, echoes of the late 1970s. War in the Middle East and the stand-off with Russia threaten energy supplies. Regulatory pressure is constraining bank credit supply. Goods and services inflation is quiescent and monetary policies remain loose but economies and markets may have become addicted to ever-larger doses of stimulus – a small rise in interest rates could conceivably have the same impact as a much larger increase historically.

A previous post argued that the US economy is vulnerable to another recession in 2016, a scenario that would be consistent with global industrial output continuing to resemble the early 1980s path.

A weaker outlook should be signalled by monetary trends. Global real narrow money started to contract in 1979 before the economic upswing faltered in 1980. The current message remains positive but six-month growth appears to have fallen sharply in August, based on data covering 60% of the aggregate – second chart. The global economy is expected here to expand solidly through late 2014 but slow in early 2015.

Rising US average earnings growth casts doubt on the Federal Open Market Committee’s current assessment that “there remains significant underutilization of labor resources”.

Annual growth in average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls increased to 2.5% in August, the highest since May 2010 and up from a low of 1.3% in October 2012.

In her Jackson Hole speech, Fed Chair Janet Yellen suggested that the FOMC is monitoring new composite measures of labour market conditions, constructed by using statistical methods to extract common information from a large number of indicators. Economists at the Kansas City Fed, for example, have created indices of the level and rate of change of labour market activity based on 24 indicators. The level measure has been trending higher since 2010 but remains 0.6 standard deviations below its historical average, consistent with the FOMC’s judgement of still-significant slack – see chart.

Such an approach, however, ignores possible structural shifts in the component indicators – the historical average may not be a good guide to “normal” conditions now.

The choice of indicators, moreover, is important: they should reflect all aspects of labour market behaviour. A notable omission from the Kansas City Fed activity measure is the job openings rate, i.e. the percentage of available jobs that are unfilled. This rose to 3.3% in June / July, matching the cyclical high reached in 2006-07, suggesting that employers now face significant difficulties recruiting suitable workers.

The job openings rate has been a better guide to wage pressures in recent years. Average earnings growth switched from a falling to rising trend in 2012 soon after the openings rate crossed above its historical average. The Kansas City Fed activity measure, by contrast, was 1.4 standard deviations below average in 2012. Nominal earnings expansion was above 4% in 2006-07 when the openings rate was last at the current level.

Faster earnings growth may contribute to the FOMC adopting less dovish language in its policy statement next week, supporting expectations of an interest rate increase in early 2015.