Category Archive: 5) Global Macro

What’s The Real Downside To Some of These Key Commodities?

Last night, Autodata reported its first estimates for September auto sales in the US. According to its own as well as those compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (the same government outfit which keeps track of GDP), vehicle sales have been sliding overall ever since April.

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Risk Was Never Low, It Was Only Hidden

The vast majority of market participants are about as ready for a semi-random "volatility event" as the dinosaurs were for the meteor strike that doomed them to oblivion.

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Surprise: It Isn’t Consumers Keeping American Factories Busy

US factories are humming along, constrained only by supply issues which might occasionally limit production. That’s the story, anyway. There’s too much business because of them, manufacturers taking in only more orders by the day leaving them struggling to catch up.But what kind of stuff is it that is being ordered from our nation’s factories?

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Weekly Market Pulse: Zooming Out

How often do you check your brokerage account? There is a famous economics paper from 1997, written by some of the giants in behavioral finance (Thaler, Kahnemann, Tversky & Schwartz), that tested what is known as myopic loss aversion.

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Jeff Snider: The Global Currency System that Really Matters

Tom welcomes an extremely thought provoking guest Jeff Snider to the show. Jeff flips the lid on the global shadow money system and shows us all the mechanisms and leavers that lie in the shadows.

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More About Less New Orders

The inventory saga, planetary in its reach. As you’ve heard, American demand for goods supercharged by the federal government’s helicopter combined with a much more limited capacity to rebound in the logistics of the goods economy left a nightmare for supply chains. As we’ve been writing lately, a highly unusual maybe unprecedented inventory cycle resulted (creating “inflation”).

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How do carbon markets work? | The Economist

In theory putting a price on carbon emissions should incentivise businesses to stop polluting. So why have carbon markets failed to achieve their goal of reducing global emissions? Read more here: https://econ.st/3mi51Eo 00:00 - Has putting a price on emissions worked? 00:27 - Where do carbon markets come from? 01:42 - How does ‘cap and trade’ work? 03:22 - Why aren’t carbon markets reducing emissions? 04:15 - What are the loopholes? 05:24 - What...

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The Market Crash Nobody Thinks Is Possible Is Coming

The banquet of consequences is being served, and risk-off crashes are, like revenge, best served cold. The ideal setup for a crash is a consensus that a crash is impossible--in other words, just like the present: sure, there are carefully measured murmurings about a "correction" but nobody with anything to lose in the way of public credibility is calling for an honest-to-goodness crash, a real crash, not a wimpy, limp-wristed dip that will...

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An Economy Dividing By Inventory And Labor

Is it delta COVID? Or the widely reported labor shortage? Something has created a soft patch in the presumed indestructible US economy still hopped up on Uncle Sam’s deposits made earlier in the year. And yet, there’s a nagging feeling over how this time, like all previous times, just might be too good to be true, too.

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Revisiting The Last Overhang

One reason why I still believe the US most likely would have entered a recession at some point in 2020 even without COVID wasn’t just the yield curve inversion that popped up several months before then. In August of 2019, the small part of the Treasury curve most people pay attention to (2s10s) did send out that dreaded signal, suggesting already to expect contraction in the intermediate term ahead of then. 

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August Avoids Zero In JGB’s

Central banks and their staffs have long been accused of trying to hide inflation. This allegation had been a staple of their critics, those charging reckless monetary policies for creating “too much” money that had allegedly been causing price imbalances all over the financial map.

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Are We Really So “Rich”? A New Way of Defining Wealth

What if our commoditized, financialized definition of wealth reflects a staggering poverty of culture, spirit, wisdom, practicality and common sense? The conventional definition of wealth is solely financial: ownership of money and assets. The assumption is that money can buy anything the owner desires: power, access, land, shelter, energy, transport and if not love, then a facsimile of caring.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Not So Evergrande

US stocks sold off last Monday due to fears over the potential – likely – failure of China Evergrande, a real estate developer that has suddenly discovered the perils of leverage. Well that and the perils of being in an industry not currently favored by Xi Jinping. He has declared that houses are for living in not speculating on and ordered the state controlled banks to lend accordingly.

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To see Germany’s future, look at its cars | The Economist

As the election approaches, Germany's carmakers will face the same challenges as its new leaders: a need to innovate, tackle climate change and reassess its trade relationship with China. How this world-renowned motor industry navigates the road ahead could tell a lot about Germany’s future. 00:00‌ ‌-‌ ‌Germany‌ ‌faces‌ ‌numerous‌ ‌challenges‌ ‌ 00:49‌ ‌-‌ ‌Can‌ ‌Germany’s‌ ‌cars‌ ‌reveal‌ ‌its‌ ‌future?‌ ‌(or‌ ‌whatever‌ ‌the‌ ‌title‌ ‌is)‌ ‌...

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All Eyes On Inventory

You’ve heard of the virtuous circle in the economy. Risk taking leads to spending/investment/hiring, which then leads to more spending/investment/hiring. Recovery, in other words. In the old days of the 20th century, quite a lot of the circle was rounded out by the inventory cycle. Both recession and recovery would depend upon how much additional product floated up and down the supply chain.

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What’s Really Going On in China

Losses will be taken and sacrifices enforced on those who don't understand the Chinese state will no longer absorb the losses of speculative excess. Let's start by stipulating that no one outside President Xi's inner circle really knows what's going on in China, and so my comments here are systemic observations, not claims of insider knowledge.

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America 2021: Inequality is Now Baked In

This complete capture of all avenues of regulation and governance can only end one way, a kind of hyper-stagflation. Zeus Y. and I go way back, and he has always had a knack for summarizing just how insane, disconnected from reality, manipulative and exploitive the status quo narrative has become.

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Now That the American Dream Is Reserved for the Wealthy, The Smart Crowd Is Opting Out

The already-wealthy and their minions are unprepared for the Smart Crowd opting out. Clueless economists are wringing their hands about the labor shortage without looking at the underlying causes, one of which is painfully obvious: the American economy now only works for the top 10%; the American Dream of turning labor into capital is now reserved for the already-wealthy.

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Weekly Market Pulse (VIDEO)

Alhambra CEO Joe Calhoun discusses China’s Evergrand, this week’s Fed meeting, the overpriced stock market, and the latest CPI numbers and reports.

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Weekly Market Pulse: Time For A Taper Tantrum?

The Fed meets this week and is widely expected to say that it is talking about maybe reducing bond purchases sometime later this year or maybe next year or at least, someday. Jerome Powell will hold a press conference at which he’ll tell us that markets have nothing to worry about because even if they taper QE, interest rates aren’t going up for a long, long time.

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