Last night the Federal Reserve released its Beige Book survey showing that the U.S. economy continued to grow at a modest pace over the last few weeks. However, the report did highlight the fact that manufacturing had seen headwinds due to the global economic slowdown and there were mixed signals on the strength of household spending. Over the period the report stated that employment seemed to be on-par with the previous period and that businesses in the US did not expect a recession soon. ‘Although concerns regarding tariffs and trade policy uncertainty continued, the majority of businesses remained optimistic about the near-term outlook’ it reported.
Yesterday we also saw the continuation of the slow-motion car crash that Brexit has become. With the ongoing shenanigans in Parliament, it seems that MP’s may have forgotten to ask what the EU thinks. Amelie de Montchalin, France's European affairs minister, said in a radio interview that any delay to Brexit without changing anything will solve nothing. She said ‘When I hear the British saying 'Give us three months more and we will solve the problem', we can see that another six months would not solve the problem, nor another three months’ adding ‘They have to be able to tell us what they want. We know what they don't want but we are still struggling to understand what they do want’.
Of course, it would help if the UK parliament actually knew what it wanted in the first place.