Category Archive: 5.) Alhambra Investments

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June 21, 2020

2020-06-22

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The Smallness of the Most Gigantic

2020-06-20

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2020-06-20

US Retail Sales, Stagnation 1992-2020
These numbers do seem epic, don’t they? It’s hard to ignore when you have the greatest percentage increase in the history of a major economic account. Just writing that sentence it’s difficult to deny the power of those words. Which is precisely the point: we already know ahead of time how the biggest economic holes in history are going to produce the biggest positives coming out of them.

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June 19, 2020

2020-06-19

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Monthly Macro Monitor – June 2020

2020-06-19

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2020-06-19

TSA checkpoint travel numbers for 2020 and 2019
The stock market has recovered most of its losses from the March COVID-19 induced sell-off and the enthusiasm with which stocks are being bought – and sold but mostly bought – could lead one to believe that the crisis is over, that the economy has completely or nearly completely recovered. Unfortunately, other markets do not support that notion nor does the available economic data.

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Fed Balance Sheet: Swap Me Update

2020-06-18

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2020-06-18

Fed Balance Sheet: Assets, 2007-2020
Just a quick update to add a little more data and color to my last Friday’s swap line criticism so hopefully you can better see how there is intentional activity behind them. Since a few people have asked, I’ll break them out with a little more detail. While the volume of swaps outstanding at the Fed has, in total, remained relatively constant (suspiciously, if you ask me), the underlying tenor of them has not.Meaning, there is purpose.

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A Chinese Outbreak (of Li v. Xi, Round 2)

2020-06-17

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2020-06-17

China Industrial Production, 1999-2020
Here they are again, seemingly at odds over how to proceed. Reminiscent of prior battles over whether to revive the economy or just let it go where it will, it appears as if China is in for Xi vs. Li Round 2. Or is it all just clever politics? Li Keqiang may be nominally the Chinese Premier but he’s a very distant second on every list of power players. Xi Jinping holds all the top spots, including a 2017-18 consolidation of power that left Xi...

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This Thing Is Only Getting Started; Or, *All* The V’s Are Light On The Right

2020-06-14

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2020-06-14

The Federal Reserve’s models really are the most optimistic of the bunch. With the policy meeting conducted today, no surprises as far as policies go, we now know what ferbus has to say about everything that’s happened this year. Skipping the usual March projections, what with the FOMC totally occupied at the time by a complete global monetary meltdown Jay Powell now says “we saw it coming”, the central bank staff released the calculations...

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Why The FOMC Just Embraced The Stock Bubble (and anything else remotely sounding inflationary)

2020-06-14

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2020-06-14

Mainstream Models World Bank
The job, as Jay Powell currently sees it, means building up the S&P 500 as sky high as it can go. The FOMC used to pay lip service to valuations, but now everything is different. He’ll signal to all those fund managers by QE raising bank reserves, leading them on in what they all want to believe is “money printing” (that isn’t).

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We Have Reached The Silly Phase of the Bull Market

2020-06-12

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2020-06-12

Have we entered a new bull market? Was the 35% pullback in the S&P 500 in March the fastest bear market in history? Or is this just a continuation of the bull market that started in 2009, interrupted by a rather large correction? Bull markets and bear markets are about behavior, about the human emotions of fear and greed. While we got a brief bout of fear in March, greed has since overwhelmed all sense, common and otherwise.

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Jeff Snider! Huge Money Printing Speaks For Itself

2020-06-10

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Full Document transcript go to:https://www.financialanalysis.tv Contact advertising: Would you like to place ads on my youtube channel? Email: [email protected] Skype: akira10k Join discussion on Topic on Fan Page https://www.facebook.com/Economicpredictions/

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A Second Against Consumer Credit And Interest ‘Stimulus’

2020-06-10

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2020-06-10

Consumer Credit, Levels SA 2006-2020
Credit card use entails a degree of risk appreciated at the most basic level. Americans had certainly become more comfortable with debt in all its forms over the many decades since the Great Depression, but the regular employment of revolving credit was perhaps the apex of this transformation. Does any commercial package on TV today not include one or more credit card offers? It certainly remains a staple of junk mail.

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Someone’s Giving Us The (Trade) Business

2020-06-09

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2020-06-09

US Trade in Goods, SA 2014-2020
The NBER has made its formal declaration. Surprising no one, as usual this group of mainstream academic Economists wishes to tell us what we already know. At least this time their determination of recession is noticeably closer to the beginning of the actual event. The Great “Recession”, you might recall, wasn’t even classified as an “official” contraction until December 2008 – a full year after the NBER figured the thing had begun.

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ECB Doubles Its QE; Or, The More Central Banks Do The Worse You Know It Will Be

2020-06-07

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2020-06-07

ECB/Eurostaff Inflation Projections, 2017-2020
A perpetual motion machine is impossible, but what about a perpetual inflation machine? This is supposed to be the printing press and central banks are, they like to say, putting it to good and heavy use. But never the inflation by which to confirm it. So round and round we go. The printing press necessary to bring about consumer price acceleration, only the lack of consumer price acceleration dictates the need for more of the printing press.

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What Did Everyone Think Was Going To Happen?

2020-06-06

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2020-06-06

Unemployment Insurance, Continued Claims, 2017-2020
Honestly, what did everyone think was going to happen? I know, I’ve seen the analyst estimates. They were talking like another six or seven perhaps eight million job losses on top of the twenty-plus already gone. Instead, the payroll report (Establishment Survey) blew everything away, coming in both at two and a half million but also sporting a plus sign.The Household Survey was even better, +3.8mm during May 2020. But, again, why wasn’t this...

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The Mirage of the Money Printer: Why the Fed Is More PR Than Policy, Feat. Jeffrey P. Snider

2020-06-05

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The conventional wisdom is that central banks are the most important economic actors in the world. Markets hang on their every word. Yet, what if that power has less to do with actual monetary policy and more to do with how the performance of that policy creates a self-fulfilling prophecy as market actors respond to media coverage? Jeff Snider is the head of global research at Alhambra Investments. In this conversation, he and NLW explore:...

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From QE to Eternity: The Backdoor Yield Caps

2020-06-04

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2020-06-04

Japan - JGB, 1986-2019
So, you’re convinced that low rates are powerful stimulus. You believe, like any good standing Economist, that reduced interest costs can only lead to more credit across-the-board. That with more credit will emerge more economic activity and, better, activity of the inflationary variety. A recovery, in other words. Ceteris paribus. What happens, however, if you also believe you’ve been responsible for bringing rates down all across the curve…and...

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All-Stars #107 Jeff Snider: Huge Money Printing Speaks For Itself….

2020-06-01

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All-Stars #107 Jeff Snider: Huge Money Printing Speaks For Itself, So Why Is Jay Powell Trying To Sell It So Aggressively? Download chartbook: https://bit.ly/3cppakW Please visit our website https://www.macrovoices.com to register your free account to gain access to supporting materials.

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Personal Income and Spending: The Other Side

2020-06-01

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2020-06-01

Personal Income & Spending, 2017-2020
The missing piece so far is consumers. We’ve gotten a glimpse at how businesses are taking in the shock, both shocks, actually, in that corporations are battening down the liquidity hatches at all possible speed and excess. Not a good sign, especially as it provides some insight into why jobless claims (as the only employment data we have for beyond March) have kept up at a 2mm pace.These are second order effects.

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Getting A Sense of the Economy’s Current Hole and How the Government’s Measures To Fill It (Don’t) Add Up

2020-05-29

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2020-05-29

GDP Pro Forma, 2010-2020
The numbers just don’t add up. Even if you treat this stuff on the most charitable of terms, dollar for dollar, way too much of the hole almost certainly remains unfilled. That’s the thing about “stimulus” talk; for one thing, people seem to be viewing it as some kind of addition without thinking it all the way through first.You have to begin by sizing up the gross economic deficit it is being haphazardly poured into – with an additional emphasis...

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So Much Dollar Bull

2020-05-27

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2020-05-27

TIC - US Banking Data, 2006-2020
According to the Federal Reserve’s calculations, the US dollar in Q1 pulled off its best quarter in more than twenty years – though it really didn’t need the full quarter to do it. The last time the Fed’s trade-weighed dollar index managed to appreciate farther than the 7.1% it had in the first three months of 2020, the year was 1997 during its final quarter when almost the whole of Asia was just about to get clobbered.In second place (now third)...

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