Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

Filter archive by: Show All Show only Articles Show only Videos

What Happens When Complexity Unravels?

2022-05-10

by

2022-05-10

Those glancing at the appearances will be assured all is well and it will all sort itself out. Those who look behind the screen will move away as fast as they can. When finances tighten, there are two choices: cut expenses or increase revenues. Monopolies, cartels and governments can increase revenues by increasing taxes or the price of goods and services because users /customers / taxpayers have no alternative.

Read More »

Who’s Playing Puppetmaster, And Who Is Master of Puppets

2022-05-09

by

2022-05-09

Cue up the old VHS tapes of Bill Clinton. The former President was renowned for displaying, anyway, great empathy. He famously said in October 1992, weeks before the election that would bring him to the White House, “I feel your pain.”What pain? As Clinton’s chief political advisor later clarified, “it’s the economy stupid.”

Read More »

Not the 1970s or the 1920s: We’re in Uncharted Territory

2022-05-08

by

2022-05-08

All of these similarities and differences are setting up a sea-change revaluation of capital, resources and labor that will be on the same scale as the extraordinary transitions of the 1920s and 1970s.

Read More »

China Then Europe Then…

2022-05-08

by

2022-05-08

This is the difference, though in the end it only amounts to a matter of timing. When pressed (very modestly) on the slow pace of the ECB’s “inflation” “fighting” (theater) campaign, its President, Christine Lagarde, once again demonstrated her willingness to be patient if not cautious.

Read More »

The Contrarian Curse

2022-05-07

by

2022-05-07

What if all the new consensus memes are as wrong as the ones they replaced? I have the Contrarian Curse, and I have it bad. The Contrarian Curse is: as soon as the herd adopts your previously contrarian view, you start questioning the new consensus, just as you questioned the previous consensus.

Read More »

Collateral Shortage…From *A* Fed Perspective

2022-05-07

by

2022-05-07

It’s never just one thing or another. Take, for example, collateral scarcity. By itself, it’s already a problem but it may not be enough to bring the whole system to reverse. A good illustration would be 2017. Throughout that whole year, T-bill rates (4-week, in particular) kept indicating this very shortfall, especially the repeated instances when equivalent bill yields would go below the RRP “floor” and often stay there for prolonged periods....

Read More »

Some ‘Core’ ‘Inflation’ Difference(s)

2022-05-06

by

2022-05-06

The FOMC meets next week, with everyone everywhere expecting a 50 bps rate hike to be announced on Wednesday. Yesterday’s “unexpected” and “shocking” negative GDP is unlikely to deter anyone on the committee.

Read More »

Is Housing a Bubble That’s About to Crash?

2022-05-05

by

2022-05-05

We are all prone to believing the recent past is a reliable guide to the future. But in times of dynamic reversals, the past is an anchor thwarting our progress, not a forecast. Are we heading into another real estate bubble / crash?

Read More »

Synchronized Manufacturing, Hopefully Not Mao

2022-05-04

by

2022-05-04

This is one of those cases when Inigo Montoya, the lovable if fictional rapscallion from the movie The Princess Bride, would pop into the scene to devastatingly deliver his now famous rebuke. Last week, China’s one-man Dear Leader said that the country was going to start up its own version of Build Back Better.

Read More »

What Really ‘Raises’ The Rising ‘Dollar’

2022-05-03

by

2022-05-03

It’s one of those things which everyone just accepts because everyone says it must be true. If the US$ is rising, what else other than the Federal Reserve. In particular, the Fed has to be raising rates in relation to other central banks; interest rate differentials.

Read More »

Weekly Market Pulse: Welcome Back To The Old Normal

2022-05-03

by

2022-05-03

Stagflation. It’s a word that strikes fear in the hearts of investors, one that evokes memories – for some of us – of bell bottoms, disco, and Jimmy Carter’s American malaise. The combination of weak growth and high inflation is the worst of all worlds, one that required a transformational leader and a cigar-chomping central banker to defeat the last time it came around.

Read More »

Is It Recession?

2022-04-30

by

2022-04-30

According to today’s advance estimate for first quarter 2022 US real GDP, the third highest (inflation-adjusted) inventory build on record subtracted nearly a point off the quarter-over-quarter annual rate. Yes, you read that right; deducted from growth, as in lowered it. This might seem counterintuitive since by GDP accounting inventory adds to output.

Read More »

Doom Porn and Empty Optimism

2022-04-29

by

2022-04-29

If we can't discern the difference between doom-porn and investing in self-reliance, then solutions will continue to be out of reach. I'm often accused of calling 783 of the last two bubble pops (or was it 789? Forgive the imprecision). Like many others who have publicly explored the notion that the status quo isn't actually sustainable despite its remarkable tenaciousness, I am pilloried as a doom-and-gloomer (among other things, ahem).

Read More »

Historic Inventory Continued In March, But Is It All Price Illusion, Too?

2022-04-28

by

2022-04-28

The Census Bureau today released its advanced estimates for March trade. These include, among other accounts like imports and exports, preliminary results reported by retailers and wholesalers. That means, for our purposes, inventories. Oh my, was there ever more inventory. It was, apparently, widely expected that following an avalanche of goods building up over the previous five months the situation might calm down a touch.

Read More »

Euro$ #5 in Goods

2022-04-27

by

2022-04-27

Last Friday, S&P Global (the merged successor to IHS Markit) reported that its PMI for German manufacturing fell to 54.1. It hadn’t been that low for more than a year and a half. Worse than that, the index for New Orders dropped below 50 for the first time since the middle of 2020. The excuses are plentiful, as there’s COVID, supply problems, Russia, a drop in demand. Wait, what was that last one?

Read More »

Crash Is King

2022-04-26

by

2022-04-26

This may be one of many revaluations of capital vis a vis labor and resources and core vis a vis periphery. You've heard the expression "cash is king." Very true. But it's equally true that "crash is king:" when speculative excesses collapse under their own extremes, the crash crushes all other narratives and becomes the dominant dynamic.

Read More »

CNY’s Drop Wasn’t ‘Devaluation’ in ’15 nor ’18, and It Isn’t ‘Devaluation’ Now

2022-04-25

by

2022-04-25

For one thing, that whole Bretton Woods 3 thing is really off to an interesting start. And by interesting, I mean predictably backward. According to its loud and leading proponent, China’s yuan was supposed to be ascending while the dollar sank, its first step toward what many still claim will end up in some biblical-like abyss.

Read More »

The (less) Dollars Behind Xi’s Shanghai of Shanghai

2022-04-25

by

2022-04-25

What everyone is saying, because it’s convenient, is that China’s zero-COVID policies are going to harm the economy. No. Economic harm of the past is the reason for the zero-COVID policies. As I showed yesterday, the cracking down didn’t just show up around 2020, begun right out in the open years beforehand, born from the scattering ashes of globally synchronized growth.

Read More »

Not Good Goods

2022-04-24

by

2022-04-24

The goods economy in the United States is – maybe was – the lone economic bright spot. That in and of itself should’ve provoked more caution, instead there was the red-hot recovery to sell under the cover of supply shock pricing changes. The sheer spending on goods, and how they arrived, each unabashedly artificial from the get-go.

Read More »

Shanghai’s Current Plight Began in 2017

2022-04-23

by

2022-04-23

The first chapters to China’s new story now playing out in Shanghai were written down in October 2017. Planning for them had begun years earlier, their author Xi Jinping requiring more research before committing them to paper. Communist authorities there had grown increasingly concerned about the lack of growth potential for its political system by then utterly dependent for a quarter-century on the economy growing.

Read More »