Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

US Economic Growth Prospects Remain Poor (w/ Jeffrey Snider) | Expert View | Real Vision™

Watch this full interview with The Expert: Jeffrey Snider, exclusively on Real Vision. Learn how you can become a great investor: http://rvtv.io/2AZFpTE The flattening US yield curve is not what matters, according to monetary economics expert Jeff Snider, but the nominal level at which it flattens. He argues that if the current moves just take …

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Donald Trump’s tax reforms, cartooned | The Economist

The Republican tax bill might be hard to swallow. In his latest drawing, our cartoonist KAL gives his take on the upcoming reforms. Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: http://econ.st/2BEKW5Y A controversial tax reform package is up for a vote in the US Congress. It will have important long-term effects for the …

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Emerging Market Preview: Week Ahead

EM FX was mixed last week, with political optimism driving the big winners ZAR and CLP. We remain cautious, as the Fed has signaled its intent to continue tightening in 2018.

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GoldSeek Radio – Dec 15, 2017 [CHARLES HUGH SMITH & JOHN EMBRY] weekly

GoldSeek Radio’s Chris Waltzek talks to Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html and to John Embry, Chief Investment Strategist at Sprott Asset Management. http://sprott.com/ http://www.goldseek.com/ http://radio.goldseek.com/

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Slow wage growth to keep Fed on prudent normalisation track

The November employment report showed another ‘Goldilocks’ set of conditions for investors: employment growth remained firm, especially in cyclical sectors like manufacturing and construction. At the same time, wage growth stayed soft – which means the Federal Reserve is unlikely to shift its current prudent communication on interest -rate hikes (although it is still very likely to hike 25bps on 13 December).

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Could Central Banks Dump Gold in Favor of Bitcoin?

All of which brings us to the "crazy" idea of backing fiat currencies with cryptocurrencies, an idea I first floated back in 2013, long before the current crypto-craze emerged. Exhibit One: here's your typical central bank, creating trillions of units of currency every year, backed by nothing but trust in the authority of the government, created at the whim of a handful of people in a room and distributed to their cronies, or at the behest of their...

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The Rug Yank Phase of Fed Policy

The political differences of today’s two leading parties are not over ultimate questions of principle. Rather, they are over opposing answers to the question of how a goal can be achieved with the least sacrifice. For lawmakers, the goal is to promise the populace something for nothing, while pretending to make good on it.

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Fed rate unlikely to move much above 2 percent next year

The Federal Reserve is probably looking back at 2017 with satisfaction. After on the rate rise expected on 13 December, it will have pushed through the three rate hikes it signalled earlier in the year. For once, it has not under-delivered. Meanwhile, the gradual, ‘passive’ decline in the Fed’s balance sheet has been mostly ignored by markets. In fact, broader financial conditions have eased this year despite the Fed’s monetary tightening....

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Bitcoin vs Fiat Currency: Which Fails First?

What if bitcoin is a reflection of trust in the future value of fiat currencies? I am struck by the mainstream confidence that bitcoin is a fraud/fad that will soon collapse, while central bank fiat currencies are presumed to be rock-solid and without risk. Those with supreme confidence in fiat currencies might want to look at a chart of Venezuela's fiat currency, which has declined from 10 to the US dollar in 2012 to 5,000 to the USD earlier this...

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Chart of the Week: Collateral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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How free electricity would change the world | The Economist

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?

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

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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