Category Archive: 5.) Alhambra Investments

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So Much Fragile *Cannot* Be Random Deflationary Coincidences

2022-03-10

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2022-03-10

At first glance, or first exposure to this, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why all these so many pieces could be related. Outwardly, from the mainstream perspective, anyway, you’d think them random, and even if somehow correlated they’re supposed to be in the opposite way from what’s happened.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Oil Shock

2022-03-08

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2022-03-08

Crude oil prices rose over 25% last week and as I sit down to write this evening the overnight futures are up another 8% to around $125. Almost every other commodity on the planet rose in prices last week too, as did the dollar. Those two factors – rising dollar and rising commodity prices – mean the likelihood of recession in the coming year has risen significantly in just the last week.

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Houston, We Have An Oil (and inventory) Problem

2022-03-07

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2022-03-07

If only, like in the aftermath of the Apollo 13 explosion, we could just radio Houston to get started in figuring out just the way out of our fix. Mission Control would certainly buzz all the right people with the right stuff, summoning the best engineers and scientists from their quiet divans to the frenzied and dangerous work ahead.

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For The Fed, None Of These Details Will Matter

2022-03-06

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2022-03-06

Most people have the impression that these various payroll and employment reports just go into the raw data and count up the number of payrolls and how many Americans are employed. Perhaps the BLS taps the IRS database as fellow feds, or ADP as a private company in the same data business of employment just tallies how many payrolls it processes as the largest provider of back-office labor services.That’s just not how it works, though. In fact,...

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SWIFT Isn’t The ‘Nuclear Option’ For Russia, Because Russia can sell the dollars elsewhere and NOT via Swift

2022-03-01

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2022-03-01

As everyone “knows”, the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency which can only leave the US government in control of it. Participation is both required and at the pleasure of American authorities. If you don’t accept their terms, you risk the death penalty: exile from the privilege of the US dollar’s essential business.From what little most people know about that essential business, it seems like it has something to do with that thing called...

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Briefing Even More Inventory

2022-03-01

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2022-03-01

Retail sales stumbled in December, contributing some to the explosion in inventory across the US supply chain – but not all. Inventories were going to spike even if sales had been better. In fact, retail inventories rose at such a record pace beyond anything seen before, had sales been far improved the monthly increase in inventories still would’ve unlike anything in the data series.

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The Red Warning

2022-02-24

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2022-02-24

Now it’s the Russian’s fault. Belligerence surrounding Donbas and Ukraine, raw materials and energy supplies to Europe threatened by Putin’s coiled bear. Why wouldn’t markets grow worried?There’s always a reason why we shouldn’t take these things seriously, or quickly dismiss them out of hand as the temporary product of whichever political fear-of-the-day.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Are We There Yet?

2022-01-31

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2022-01-31

I’ll just get this out of the way right at the beginning. The question in the title of this post refers to the end of the ongoing stock market correction and the answer is likely no. There are no sure things in this business so it isn’t an unequivocal no, but based on history, the odds favor more weakness.

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FOMC Goes With Unemployment Rate While This Huge Number Happens To Far More Relevant Economic Data

2022-01-29

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2022-01-29

The first time I can consciously remember using the term landmine was probably here in February 2019. I had described the same process play out several times before, I had just never applied that term. There was all sorts of market chaos in the final two months of 2018, including a full-on stock market correction, believe it or not, leaving the inflation and recovery narrative in near complete tatters.

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After Today’s FOMC, Yield Curve Is Already As Flat As It Was In Mar ’18 **Without A Single Rate Hike Yet**

2022-01-28

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2022-01-28

It’s not hard to reason why there continues to be this conflict of interest (rates). On the one hand, impacting the short end of the yield curve, the unemployment rate has taken a tight grip on the FOMC’s limited imagination. The rate hikes are coming and the markets like all mainstream commentary agree that as it stands there’s nothing on the horizon to stop Jay Powell’s hawkishness.

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The Hawks Circle Here, The Doves Win There

2022-01-26

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2022-01-26

We’ve been here before, near exactly here. On this side of the Pacific Ocean, in the US particularly the situation was said to be just grand. The economy was responding nicely to QE’s 3 and 4 (yes, there were four of them by that point), Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had said in the middle of 2013 it was becoming more than enough, creating for him and the FOMC coveted breathing space so as to begin tapering both of those ongoing programs.A...

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Weekly Market Pulse: Fear Makes A Comeback

2022-01-24

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2022-01-24

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

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Good Time To Go Fish(er)ing Around The Yield Curve

2022-01-21

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2022-01-21

It should be as simple as it sounds. Lower LT UST yields, less growth and inflation. Thus, higher LT UST yields, more growth and inflation. Right? If nominal levels are all there is to it, then simplicity rules the interpretation. Visiting with George Gammon last week, he confessed to committing this sin of omission.

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Weekly Market Pulse: A Very Contrarian View

2022-01-19

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2022-01-19

What is the consensus about the economy today? Will 2022 growth be better or worse than 2021? Actually, that probably isn’t the right question because the economy slowed significantly in the second half of 2021. The real question is whether growth will improve from that reduced pace.

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US CPI Reaches Seven On US Goods Prices, With Disinflation Setting In Everywhere Else (incl. US Services)

2022-01-16

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2022-01-16

How is that US Treasury rates out in the independent longer end of the yield curve have now “suffered” a seven percent CPI to go along with double taper and triple maybe quadruple (if the whispers are to be believed) rate hikes this year, yet have weathered all of that allegedly bond-busting brutality with barely a market fluctuation?

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China’s Petroyuan, Uncle Sam’s Checkbook, The Fed’s Bank Reserves: Who Really Sits On King Dollar’s Throne? (trick question)

2022-01-14

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2022-01-14

A full part of the inflation hysteria, the first one, was the dollar’s looming crash. The currency was, too many claimed, on the verge of collapse by late 2017, heading downward and besieged on multiple fronts by economics and politics alike.

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Sentiment v. Substance: Checking In On Collateral Via, Yes, The Fed

2022-01-13

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2022-01-13

The Federal Reserve, like other central banks around the world, it does lend out the securities it owns and holds. Sophisticated modern wholesale money markets are highly collateralized, so much so that collateral itself takes on the properties of currency.

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Conflict Of Interest (rates): 10-year Treasury Yield Highest in Almost Two Years

2022-01-12

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2022-01-12

The dollar was high and going higher. Emerging markets had been seriously complaining. In one, the top central banker for India outright warned, “dollar funding has evaporated.” The TIC data supported his view, with full-blown negative months, net selling from afar that’s historically akin to what was coming out of India and the rest of the world.

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Taper Discretion Means Not Loving Payrolls Anymore

2022-01-10

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2022-01-10

When Alan Greenspan went back to Stanford University in September 1997, his reputation was by then well-established. Even as he had shocked the world only nine months earlier with “irrational exuberance”, the theme of his earlier speech hadn’t actually been about stocks; it was all about money.The “maestro” would revisit that subject repeatedly especially in the late nineties, and it was again his topic in California early Autumn ’97.

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Previewing Payrolls By PMIs

2022-01-09

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2022-01-09

With the monthly Friday Payroll Ritual lurking tomorrow morning, and having been focused on PMI estimates before it, a quick look at the ISM’s Non-manufacturing PMI especially its employment index to bridge the latter to the former. The update today for the month of December put the headline estimate at 62.0, down from 69.1 the month prior.Omicron?While a rather sharp and unexpected 7-point drop, other than the size of the decline at 62.0 there’s...

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