Why Most Big Economies Don’t Move the World

Over the last decade, average S&P 500 futures movement around:

• Chinese industrial production

• German IFO

• Japanese Tankan survey

• UK GDP

…has fallen by more than 70%.

Meanwhile, U.S. CPI routinely produces 40–70 point ES swings.
Jobs data can shift entire monthly trend structures.

Why?

1. When capital controls exist, data loses universality.

2. When data is curated, the signal degrades.

3. When domestic markets lack depth, global reflexivity cannot form.

By 2026, China’s once-powerful influence on global risk appetite has dropped to its lowest point in two decades. Copper, oil, EM FX — all show muted sensitivity to Chinese announcements compared to the 2010–2015 window. The “China PMI print” simply doesn’t command the global cycle anymore.

If you want to understand China’s real economic pulse today, you don’t look at government data — you look at Apple’s earnings, TSMC’s shipments, Louis Vuitton’s sales, global ports, commodity inventories, and U.S. semiconductor export flows.

Difference

a. U.S. data is globally integrated.

b. The U.S. has the deepest capital markets in history.

We live in a world where most “big economy” data has minimal global consequence because the informational value, market depth, and transmission mechanisms simply don’t exist.

We pretend the world is multipolar, but markets behave as if it’s not.

The only data that can reliably alter global positioning comes from the only economy that:

• floats truth through its corporations,

• floats liquidity through its markets,

• floats credibility through its institutions,

• and floats the world through its demand.

Everything else is commentary.