MSI

Independent monthly business surveys offer the most reliable evidence of the economy’s business cycle position and its short-term growth outlook. Survey data collected by the U.S. purchasing agents about production, sales, inventories, employment, prices and intangibles, such as business and consu...

Those who are still guessing about the new world order should look carefully at the unfolding U.S., China and Russia relations. A widely assumed world order with the United Nations at its core has lost the little relevance it ever had. Big power relations have always been the predominant form of run...

The guessing game behind Beijing’s economic growth forecasts looks like a way to show China naysayers incompetent and their agenda ideologically biased. And incompetent they are, because China’s this year growth estimate between 4.5 percent and 5 percent is fully consistent with the country’s ...

Washington’s long overdue realignment of terms of trade with the rest of the world has not interfered with expected behavioral relationships in an open and free market economy. The GDP statistics for 2025, released February 20, 2026, show that U.S. imports of goods and services last year increased...

Mainstream media can be forgiven for misunderstanding the reasons of the European monetary union’s sluggish economic growth. But it is quite a different problem when European leaders call for grandiose policy programs while ignoring structural problems that are undermining their epochal project of...

With a rapidly increasing population of 700 million, the economic growth of the trading bloc of eleven Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) continues to advance at an annual rate of 5 percent. The group’s flexible organizational structure helps to maintain economic, political and social cohesion – wi...

Geopolitics have always been the main factor influencing volumes and directions of world trade. Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 was such a geopolitical event that reinforced existing Asian security faultlines. Ostensibly, that move was meant to increase American political and mi...

The European project of economic and political unification started out with the Treaty of Rome in March 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom). There were six founding member countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxem...

External sector of the Chinese economy -- the sum of exports and imports of its goods and services -- amounts to about 40 percent of the country’s GDP. By that measure, China is an important part of the world trading system, and a country whose economic growth very much depends on its overseas bus...

With an increase of 2.1 percent during the first nine months of this year, the U.S. economy is moving along at a pace largely consistent with its physical limits to growth in an environment of somewhat elevated inflation pressures. Over that period, the economy was driven by a 2.8 percent growth of ...