Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

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Chart of the Week: Collateral

2017-12-16

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2017-12-16

US Treasuries, Jan 2017 - Dec 2017
It’s been a week of quite righteous focus on collateral. The 4-week bill equivalent yield closes it at just 114 bps, with only three days left before the RRP “floor” is moved up by the FOMC to 125 bps. That’s too much premium in price, though we know why given what FRBNY reported for repo fails last week.

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China Exports and Industrial Production: Revisiting Once More The True Worst Case

2017-12-16

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2017-12-16

Labor Market Growth, 1968 - 2017
As weird as it may seem at first, the primary economic problem right now is that the global economy looks like it is growing again. There is no doubt that it continues on an upturn, but the mere fact that whatever economic statistic has a positive sign in front of it ends up being classified as some variant of strong. That’s how this works in mainstream analysis, this absence of any sort of gradation where if it’s negative it’s bad (though in 2015...

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The Stock Market and the FOMC

2017-12-16

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2017-12-16

Dow Price in Dollars and Gold, 1800 - 2017
As the final FOMC announcement of the year approaches, we want to briefly return to the topic of how the meeting tends to affect the stock market from a statistical perspective. As long time readers may recall, the typical performance of the stock market in the trading days immediately ahead of FOMC announcements was quite remarkable in recent decades. We are referring to the Seaonax event study of the average (or seasonal) performance across a...

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GSR interviews CHARLES HUGH SMITH – Dec 13, 2017 Nugget

2017-12-15

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GoldSeek Radio’s Chris Waltzek talks to Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html http://www.goldseek.com/ http://radio.goldseek.com/

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A crucial step towards US tax cuts

2017-12-15

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2017-12-15

Impact of Tax Cuts, 2018 - 2027
With the approval of the Senate tax bill in the early hours of Saturday 2 December, a key step has been taken toward tax cuts. The next chapter in the process is to reconcile this version with the House of Representatives’ tax bill, most likely in a ‘conference committee ’ from which a final version will emerge.

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Defining The Economy Through Payrolls

2017-12-15

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2017-12-15

Labor Market Growth, 1968 - 2017
The year 2000 was a transition year in a lot of ways. Though Y2K amounted to mild mass hysteria, people did have to get used to writing the date with 20 in front of the year rather than 19. It was a new millennium (depending on your view of Year 0) that seemed to have started off under the best possible terms. Not only were stocks on fire at the outset, the economy was, too.

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Why are women paid less than men? | The Economist

2017-12-14

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The gender pay gap is not caused by women earning less than men for the same job. It is largely because women choose different careers and suffer a “motherhood penalty”’. Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: http://econ.st/2Bnu9E9 Women who work full-time, still earn 15% less than men. But that’s not because they …

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[CHARLES HUGH SMITH] CRASH COMING – Three Bubbles! Strikes and You’re Out

2017-12-14

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How free electricity would change the world | The Economist

2017-12-13

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Imagine if heating and powering homes became free in the next decade. What would that mean for the world? Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: http://econ.st/2AjsewG Daily Watch: mind-stretching short films throughout the working week. For more from Economist Films visit: http://econ.st/2AkclGr Check out The Economist’s full video catalogue: http://econ.st/20IehQk Like The …

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Charles Hugh Smith Is America Approaching Hyperinflation?

2017-12-13

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Charles Hugh Smith talks about the disparity in the government’s CPI index that states the cost of living is less than 2% per year when reality is different.

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A Race To The Potential Behind Bitcoin

2017-12-13

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2017-12-13

The timing just never seems to fall in our favor. If we had had this conversation ten years ago as would have been appropriate, then this evolution might have fell perfectly in our collective laps. Just as the global financial system, really the international, interbank monetary system of the eurodollar, was crashing all around us, the genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain was hard coded.

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Three Years Ago QE, Last Year It Was China, Now It’s Taxes

2017-12-13

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2017-12-13

China Manufacturing PMI, May 2007 - Nov 2017
China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported last week that the official manufacturing PMI for that country rose from 51.6 in October to 51.8 in November. Since “analysts” were expecting 51.4 (Reuters poll of Economists) it was taken as a positive sign. The same was largely true for the official non-manufacturing PMI, rising like its counterpart here from 54.3 the month prior to 54.8 last month.

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A Radical Critique of Universal Basic Income

2017-12-12

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2017-12-12

Money and Work
This critique reveals the unintended consequences of UBI. Readers have been asking me what I thought of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as the solution to the systemic problem of jobs being replaced by automation.To answer this question, I realized I had to start by taking a fresh look at work and its role in human life and society. And since UBI is fundamentally a distribution of money, I also needed to take a fresh look at our system of money.

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Less Retail Jobs, More Amazon Robots: Get Used To It

2017-12-12

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2017-12-12

Robots
When it comes to job creation in the United States, President Trump will be displeased to hear the latest findings from Quartz: 170,000 fewer retail jobs in 2017 - and 75,000 more Amazon robots. In November, we explained that while everyone likes to point the finger at Amazon, America’s retail apocalypse can’t be tied to just one catalyst (see: A Look At America’s Retail Apocalypse In Charts), however, fierce competition in the industry has induced...

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What Is Money? (Yes, We’re Talking About Bitcoin)

2017-12-11

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2017-12-11

What is money? We all assume we know, because money is a commonplace feature of everyday life. Money is what we earn and exchange for goods and services. Everyone thinks the money they’re familiar with is the only possible system of money—until they run across an entirely different system of money.

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Emerging Markets: Preview of the Week Ahead

2017-12-11

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2017-12-11

EM FX closed on a firm note, though most currencies were down for the entire week. TRY and ZAR outperformed, but we do not think that will be sustained. FOMC meeting this week will provide some event risk for EM.

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Giant Sucking Sound Sucks (Far) More Than US Industry Now

2017-12-11

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2017-12-11

Case Study in Conundrum, Jan 1997 - 2004
There are two possibilities with regard to stubbornly weak US imports in 2017. The first is the more obvious, meaning that the domestic goods economy despite its upturn last year isn’t actually doing anything positive other than no longer being in contraction. The second would be tremendously helpful given the circumstances of American labor in the whole 21st century so far. In other words, perhaps US consumers really are buying at a healthy pace,...

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Reduced Trade Terms Salute The Flattened Curve

2017-12-10

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2017-12-10

US Imports, Jan 2007 - 2017
The Census Bureau reported earlier today that US imports of foreign goods jumped 9.9% year-over-year in October. That is the second largest increase since February 2012, just less than the 12% import growth recorded for January earlier this year.

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Emerging Markets: What Changed

2017-12-09

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2017-12-09

China eased curbs on coal use for heating in the northern provinces to cope with colder weather. Poland announced a cabinet shuffle. Poland’s lower house approved the controversial judicial reform bill. President Trump announced that the US recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Brazil COPOM was more dovish than expected after cutting rates 50 bp to 7.0%. Chile central bank cut its 2017 and 2018 inflation forecasts and shifted to a more dovish...

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Foreign aid: who gives the most, and where does it go? | The Economist

2017-12-08

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Rich countries are giving more in foreign aid than ever before. But which countries are the most generous? Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: http://econ.st/2AAzFCG Rich countries are giving away more in aid than at any other time on record. In 2016 more than $140bn was distributed around the world. According to …

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